THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)
T hird time was the charm for Dashiell Hammett's famous mystery novel. Roy Del Ruth had made a very good version with Ricardo Cortez as a rather too urbane Sam Spade in 1931, a take on the book that retains a certain freshness owing to the fact that it lacks any special reverence for its source material. (And that version boasts the wonderful pre-code moment in which Iva Archer spots Brigid O'Shaughnessy in Spade's apartment in her dressing gown and poses the immortal question, "Who's that dame wearin' my kimono?") William Dieterle's 1936 version, SATAN MET A LADY, is one of the greatest of all cinematic two-headed cows, but hardly a version of THE MALTESE FALCON. (This one gets so confused in its plotting that it inserts a bunch of "explanatory" news items on the history of its ersatz falcon to help clarify things. It doesn't help.)
John Huston's version, on the other hand, virtually is the book. The atmosphere (which practically defined noir) is dead on the mark and the film is so perfectly cast that the performers either all but disappear into their roles, or else the roles are so like their screen personalities that there seems no difference. Bogart is at once shabbier than Cortez while being a lot less the lounge lizard than his predecessor's rather obvious Lothario. Mary Astor is more realistic and less actressy than Bebe Daniels had been, while that magnificent trio of villains Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook Jr. were unbeatable, despite the fact that Dudley Digges (who originated at least one other role Greenstreet would inherit in the forties), Otto Matieson, and Dwight Frye were certainly no slouches in the original. The 1931 film is a bit more over the top in its pre-code presentation of the homosexual nature of the Digges/Frye relationship (even to a sequence in which Matieson blatantly and duplicitly hits on Frye), but only the Huston film preserves the word "gunsel" to describe the Cook character. Presumably, in 1941 the censors thought this referred to a gunman and not a homosexual!
At bottom, what truly sets Huston's film apart is that it has a sense of the mythic about it that is quite lacking in the earlier version. The Falcon in both, of course, turns out to be bogus, but it is left to Huston's film to offer that brilliant final statement when Spade is asked, "It's heavy. What is it?" only to reply, "The stuff that dreams are made of." And that, of course, is exactly the stuff that classics-as opposed to very good films-are made of.