![]() ![]() The director set great store by appropriate casting, and his selections here were remarkable. In the film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, Huston improved on Hammett by filling the characters on the page with extraordinarily vivid human content. Its title is a pun, referring not only to gory violence but also to the potential rise of the Communist International.” Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest (1929), is a startling, hallucinatory series of bloody episodes and psychic traumas, set-notes James Naremore in More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (1998)-“during a period of murderous labor struggles, White House scandals, and Prohibition-style gangsterism never overtly tendentious, it is nonetheless a deadpan exposé of union busting and police violence, filled with cataclysmic bloodshed and raw exploitation of the weak by the strong. Ernest Hemingway was a far greater figure of the same generation. He belonged to a generation of artists, which emerged following the rise of America as an imperialist power and the slaughterhouse of World War I, determined to strip life (and language) down to its essentials, to remove elaborate aestheticism, ornamentation and rhetoric. Hammett was a left-wing writer (eventually jailed during the anti-communist witch-hunts), of the hardboiled school. Huston’s The Maltese Falcon is concisely and confidently realized, with almost no wasted words or movements. In the end, no one ends up with the supposedly priceless gold bird, several people are dead and others on their way to prison. Cairo, O’Shaughnessy and Gutman, the latter of whom fills in the details about the object of their collective desire, have been pursuing the figurine, which supposedly dates from the 16th century, all across the globe. Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) soon arrives at Spade’s office and offers the private eye $5,000 if he can help locate a mysterious “black figure of a bird.” Later, Spade encounters Kasper Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet), and his hired thug, Wilmer (Elisha Cook Jr.). However, when Spade tracks her down, she still refuses to explain what she is up to. In any event, everything that “Miss Wonderly” told Spade and Archer was untrue, starting with her name, which is actually Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Spade angrily rejects the imputation, and also protects the identity of his client. The police come knocking at Spade’s door, hinting that he might have killed Thursby in revenge for his partner’s being knocked off. Only a half-hour later, Thursby is also murdered. The same night, Archer turns up dead, shot at close-range. Spade and Archer (who personally volunteers to follow Wonderly that evening) agree to take the case. She claims to be looking for her wayward younger sister, who is keeping company with a roughneck, Floyd Thursby. The series of events, which ultimately leads to the killing of three men (four in the novel), begins with a visit by a Miss Wonderly (Mary Astor) to the offices of Spade and his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan). In San Francisco, private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) becomes involved with a group of devious and scheming adventurers in pursuit of a solid gold, jewel-encrusted statuette allegedly worth a king’s ransom. Virtually every line of dialogue is borrowed from the original source. The Huston film is conspicuously faithful to the Hammett book. A rather stiff but facetious version, with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels, directed by Roy Del Ruth, was released in 1931, while a wildly misguided comic adaptation (retitled Satan Met a Lady), with Warren William and Bette Davis, directed by William Dieterle, came out in 1936. Entertainment.īased on the detective novel of the same title by Dashiell Hammett, published in 1930, The Maltese Falcon -or variations of it-had been filmed twice before. The recent showings were sponsored by Turner Classic Movies (TCM), Fathom Events and Warner Bros. The film was shot in June and July 1941 and opened in October of that year. John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon was screened in late January at theaters in the US to mark 80 years since its release. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |