Sun 12 Oct 2014
DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Maltese Falcon. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1930. Originally published in Black Mask magazine as a five part serial from September 1929 through January 1930. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback. Film: Warner Bros., 1931; also released as Dangerous Female (Ricardo Cortez). Also: Warner Bros., 1936, as Satan Met a Lady (Warren William as Ted Shane). Also: Warner Bros., 1941 (Humphrey Bogart).
I don’t suppose I have to convince you to read this book, do I? If you haven’t read it yet, I don’t suppose you will. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’ve never gotten around to it. It would be easy to do. But remember, nobody lives forever. You’ve only got one life to live, and that’s all you’ve got.
COMMENTS:
1. The part of Sam Spade was made for Humphrey Bogart.
2. John Huston was wise to write the part of Rhea Gutman out of the screenplay.
3. Spade’s mind always seems to be several jumps ahead of the story, but Barzun and Taylor call him “repeatedly stupid.” Why?
4. Likeable, I’m not so sure he is.
October 12th, 2014 at 10:50 pm
I had to laugh when I read the comment about Barzun and Taylor calling Sam Spade “repeatedly stupid”.
I love the Barzun and Taylor book but I think they really did not like the hardboiled type of novel. They liked the English puzzle type of story far more.
I reread THE MALTESE FALCON a couple years ago and it still held up to a 4th or 5th rereading. I once had the 5 parts of the BLACK MASK serial version. Later I saw a collector at PulpFest buy the 5 parts and pay $4,000 for them. But get this, he did not buy the issues for the Hammett serial. He wanted the Earle Stanley Gardner stories.
October 13th, 2014 at 12:44 am
I read this for the first time about a year ago and thought it was very dull stuff indeed: poorly told and a totally unbelievable plot. What the fuss is about I’ll never know.
October 13th, 2014 at 1:51 am
It surprises me that the novel has never been adapted into a theatrical play (or has it?). Seems like it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to accomplish. And I’m sure there are plenty of stage actors who’d be eager to take on those characters.
October 13th, 2014 at 8:39 am
http://articles.mcall.com/2011-09-14/entertainment/mc-theater-0915-20110914_1_sam-spade-dashiell-hammett-maltese-falcon
Detective story ‘Maltese Falcon’ adapted for stage:
September 14, 2011|By Myra Yellin Outwater, Special to The Morning Call
Crowded Kitchen Players’ director Ara Barlieb is excited that the Quakertown-based company is opening its season with the East Coast premiere of a new stage adaptation of “The Maltese Falcon.”
The play, based on Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective story, was adapted to the stage by Helen Borgers, the artistic director of the Long Beach Shakespeare Company. It premiered in 2007 in California.
“This is only the second adaptation and the only approved one that the Hammett Estate has ever allowed, and we will be only the second theater company to have produced it,” says Barlieb.
“A few of us older members in the company have long cherished Dashiell Hammett’s work, and we wondered why we’d never come across a stage adaptation of any of his writing.”
And the review:
http://articles.mcall.com/2011-09-14/entertainment/mc-theater-0915-20110914_1_sam-spade-dashiell-hammett-maltese-falcon
‘Maltese Falcon’ is both funny and suspenseful
September 27, 2011|By Myra Yellin Outwater, Special to The Morning Call
The well-known story follows a fast-talking, quick-witted detective who battles a group of ineffectual thieves and a double-dealing femme fatale for possession of a legendary jewel encrusted sculpture of a bird, the Maltese Falcon.
What makes this version so interesting is that it combines the suspense of the Bogart version with the farce of a version that starred Bette Davis. The result is a plot which unfurls in the first act at a snail’s pace, slowly tantalizing the audience with mysterious bits and pieces. The tempo quickens in the second act as the mystery races toward its conclusion.
October 13th, 2014 at 8:54 am
David A.
If I understood you correctly, and perhaps this is a case of “Surely, sir, you jest,” you are to be placed in the Barzun and Taylor camp, am I right? Quite often they are right on target, but in this case I think they missed by a mile. In my opinion!
October 13th, 2014 at 10:32 am
I have to disagree with comment #2. And I have had a background of over 50 years reading and collecting Dashiell Hammett. I’ve known scores of collectors who love his work and I have not come across many readers saying that THE MALTESE FALCON is “dull” or poorly written.
If the novel was indeed dull or poor, then Hammett would not have had the big influence on hardboiled literature that he so obviously has. Every now and then I have the reaction to some great piece of literature as David A, but I realize the fault is probably with me and I try to reread and determine where I went wrong.
I recommend that David A do the same because if he keeps saying this, then he cannot expect other readers to take him seriously. This reminds of the time I was at a baseball game with some friends and one of them told me had watched CASABLANCA and thought it was a terrible movie. He then went on to attack black and white films. I laughed and moved away from him.
Maybe David A is just trying to start a flame war?
October 13th, 2014 at 12:56 pm
This reminds me that when Barzun and Taylor’s book first appeared I found so many things in it with which I disagreed that I wrote them a letter! Barzun never replied, but Taylor’s letter was very diplomatic. Basically, he said I was entitled to my opinion. It took me awhile to discover why some of the entries were so odd bibliographically and then I realized they were using the copies in their own collections. I go to it from time to time and find much wisdom.
October 13th, 2014 at 1:08 pm
As with any reviewer, you have to learn what they’re looking for in a work of fiction, and what their blind spots are. When I first I discovered there was a lot more to the world of detective fiction than was available in the local library, I used B&T extensively as a Guide, to help me find my way around. I haven’t had to make use of CATALOGUE OF CRIME recently, but I wore out two editions before I am what I am today, whatever that may be.
PS. Perhaps the best reviewer is the one you disagree with 100%.
October 13th, 2014 at 3:12 pm
Steve
Like you I wore out a couple of editions of Barzun and Taylor. They aren’t right about everything, but I found many wonderful books because of them.
An interesting way to look at THE MALTESE FALCON is that save for the authenticity of the bird there is never a time from Archer’s murder on that Spade doesn’t know who did it. I think what might seem stupid to a superficial reading becomes deliberate when you go a bit deeper. The Flitcraft story is the key to the book — a crook will always go back to being a crook, a killer a killer, and a detective a detective. There is never a moment in the book where Spade isn’t really in control of the situation which is one reason for his ‘wild’ behavior.
Hammett said Spade was what most private detectives would have liked to have been, but I don’t think many humans would aspire to be him. I have always read the book as essentially a tragedy because Spade does not overcome his fatal flaw — hence his guilt at the end when Effie is disappointed in him. Spade is called a monster, and he really is one, it makes him good at his job, but not a good man. Throughout the book he is cynical, manipulative, mercenary, ruthless, and deceptive, save that at every point in the book he tells everyone exactly what he is going to do and then does it, and at no point does anyone believe him because they can’t accept he is so inhuman.
I think it is an even better book than given credit for in terms of what it has to say and not merely as a hardboiled detective story, and there is at least one major clue in the book Hammett hides as deftly as Agatha Christie until Spade springs it at the end.
But Hammett isn’t Chandler and Spade is no knight cruising the mean streets — he is much meaner than those streets, he is not essentially a good man, and in any other world he would be an intolerable monster.
Spade is essentially an ubermensch, as much a super man as his yellow eyed cousin Jack London’s Wolf Larsen, but I think deep down Hammett is trying to tell us what makes Spade a super man also makes him a monster. Bogart is too good an actor not to give the character a more human side, but it isn’t in the novel and it isn’t in the dialogue, and I don’t think it was ever in Hammett’s plan.
I don’t think Hammett really admires or likes Spade the way he does the Op or Ned Beaumont or Nick Charles. I think he portrays him as an absolute bastard whose only redeeming characteristic is his relationship with his secretary.
October 13th, 2014 at 6:57 pm
I consider Hammett to be the Master of all crime writers, it is not an opinion Hammett apparently shared. His strong political and socially conscious views drove him to write “The Great American Novel.” to abandon genre fiction for the literary novel. A goal he would repeatedly fail to achieve.
Chandler might have had the prose that impressed the literary critics, but Hammett had a range of characters, stories and styles that Chandler never approached.
I wish he could have been happy with his work. It might have helped him stay dry after one of his endless attempts to stop drinking.
From RETURN OF THE THIN MAN – (Hammett) wrote (about Nick and Nora): “Maybe there are better writers in the world but nobody ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters.”
October 13th, 2014 at 11:24 pm
Steve,
Thanks a lot for the info & link re the “Falcon” stage play. Sounds like it was an entertaining adaptation, if not a totally serious one.
October 14th, 2014 at 8:20 am
Gary
I agree with you. I think they must have taken the Howard Duff radio show as a starting point, not the book or movie, which as I so happens I watched again last night, the Bogart one.
I don’t believe that the stage play was a success, though, else we both would have heard of it before, without my having to resort to Google to come up with it.
October 14th, 2014 at 5:29 pm
Michael
I agree about Hammett’s status and in relation to Chandler, but I don’t think he meant Spade to be all that admirable as a man, and despite his shot at Nick Charles he presents him as a much more human and likable person than Spade.
I think Hammett is too good not to know Spade is a deeply flawed human or else he wouldn’t be a great pi. Since he never lies in the book I take him to have been honest when he says a little more money might have made a difference.
I just don’t think he meant Spade to be a hero in the same sense Chandler meant Marlowe to be.
I’ve always thought Hemingway misunderstood Hammett when he wrote TO HAVE AND TO HAVE NOT. He thought Hammett was saying being tough would save you and wrote the book to show that wasn’t so. I think Hammett knew toughness wasn’t enough. At the end of FALCON Spade ends up exactly where he starts the book save Miles is dead, and that is one definition of classical tragedy.
October 15th, 2014 at 12:46 am
13. David I agree about Spade. I also wonder how much his lack of respect for his work was serious and how much was his sense of humor about himself.
I have yet to read the book (it is the only one of Hammett’s major books I have not read yet). But in the movie’s ending the tragedy was his loyalty to his work and his code of honor cost him the woman he loved. Spade seemed not to care about Archer beyond him being his partner, he certainly didn’t care enough not to cheat with Archer’s wife.
October 15th, 2014 at 3:57 pm
The film is almost word for word with the book save for the ‘stuff that dreams are made of” business, but that is enough to change the entire theme of the book. Bogie I altogether too human to be Spade exactly as he is written. Frankly Ricardo Cortez is closer to that Spade though no where near as great as Bogart.
Hammett tells the story strictly from Spade’s point of view but he never once lets us in. There is not a single passage in the book when Hammett allows us to be in on Spade’s (or anyone else) thoughts. Everything is told in narrative and dialogue and we only know what they say and do, nothing else. There is not a ‘he thought’ in the book.
I have always thought that what makes it so remarkable is that in the book Spade is never charming or likeable. He is a bastard from page one to everyone but Effie, he is never human, never fallible, he knows who killed Archer from the moment he sees the body, and throughout the book he tells everyone exactly what he is going to do in any situation and then does it.
From the minute Archer dies he tells Brigid she is going over for the murder, Gutman and Cairo he is going to give them to the police, and everyone that he might reconsider if the Falcon were real, and no one listens to him. Played by anyone but Bogart he is actually a bit repulsive (Cortez version was).
Save for Effie he is completely above the fray, showing only one emotion, and that is annoyance at having to deal with Archer’s widow now she is free of the restraining husband. Even his anger and fear in the book ring false as just part of his inhuman act.
October 15th, 2014 at 8:24 pm
David, All you write could be just so — but regarding Cortez, he stinks. That is what is wrong with the picture, not whether Spade is gentle or kind, but that the actor cannot control his performance. Sandwiches could be made from this guy’s work.
October 15th, 2014 at 9:10 pm
That was a poor choice of words on my part to describe Ricardo Cortez and his effectiveness as a leading man. Later on the the decade, as his parts became smaller and he was no longer a romantic leading man, his performances evolved and became natural and effective. He is in The Maltese Falcon and Symphony of Six Million, for example, self-conscious and aware. Dare I call it silent screen acting? Many other silent film people made easier transitions, obviously some not at all, but the Cortez problem was being the star before he, and some others had figured out the technique.
October 15th, 2014 at 10:32 pm
Barry
I don’t disagree about Cortez then or later (he did learn, he was good in Ford’s THE LAST HURRAH). But anyone playing Spade as written in the first version would have trouble projecting many admirable traits to Spade, and that is a bit truer to the book than Bogart’s much more attractive take.
And, I did say Cortez was ‘repulsive’ in the film, both performance and as written.
October 15th, 2014 at 10:55 pm
David,
You know my thinking. I like and admire Sam Spade. My kind of guy — someone to have with you in time of trouble. These other people, Effie excepted, are all immoral, brutal and downright dumb, at time. Miles and Iva, are not much. Miss Wonderly, in any of her incarnations, is a person of interest, Bebe Daniels ahead of Mary Astor. Humphrey Bogart, giving his performance in the first film version, goes through the roof. For me, in my heart, soul and imagination.
October 16th, 2014 at 3:50 pm
Barry
I see and respect your point, but the tight spots I’ve been in I’m not sure I would want Hammett’s Spade at my back. Bogart’s yes.
When Hammett said Spade was the man all private detectives aspired to be it wasn’t a compliment to private detectives or Spade, and he had a guilty and jaundiced view of his former profession. Even his choice to solve Archer’s murder is based on the fact not solving it would be bad for business.
Just the fact he has a partnership with someone as sketchy as Archer is a mark against him.
But your view is the prevalent one, and what most people get from the book and film, just not what Hammett meant for them to get from it.
October 16th, 2014 at 7:00 pm
David, all of the negatives you have articulated so well concerning Spade’s character are exactly the reasons I would like to have him at my back. Someone not politicized and unafraid. Who takes even Miles Archer at face value. 21st century parallel: Dick Cheney over Tom Frieden. Smart and tough over the sanctimonious and soft.
October 16th, 2014 at 7:00 pm
And, Hammett in his personal assessment might just be wrong.
January 8th, 2015 at 2:01 pm
Last month I saw ‘Dangerous Female’ (the 1931 pre-code version of ‘Maltese Falcon’) starring Ricardo Cortez. So, this is one aspect of the above discussion that I can comment on concisely without getting into these other, murkier issues.
Frankly, the experience was painful. I squirmed through most of it; gritting my way through to the end only because I was in a theater and had paid a hefty price to be there.
Lots of reasons for discomfort: lack of music in the soundtrack; script which didn’t match the book, actors who were visually repulsive; static/flat camerawork; clumsy acting. But Cortez was the #1 reason for my misery. He’s just awful. Sure, there’s plenty of things which can excuse Cortez for his performance. Plenty of things. But bearing this in mind didn’t help me much at the time of the showing.
This ’31 flick, really demonstrates how deft a story-adapter John Huston was.
April 13th, 2021 at 8:48 pm
It was raining today. I was meeting someone for lunch and while I stood there outside the little corner pizzeria we’d agreed on, a piece of iron fire-escape from the building above, came crashing down (whooooosh!) onto the pizzeria awning, just inches from where I stood. I looked upward and saw the whole thing swaying.
I didn’t do anything differently afterward, I didn’t sever all my relationships. I didn’t sell my car, change my name, or move to a different city.
But I thought about it; and I probably should have. ‘Flitcraft’ might be my #1 favorite American short story of all time, second only to ‘Incident at Owl Creek Bridge’.
April 13th, 2021 at 10:17 pm
Not a day you’ll ever forget, Lazy. Not a call as close as that.
May 2nd, 2021 at 8:32 pm
Indeed. Just one of those weird things. You have to shrug it off or go nuts.
Unrelated question: isn’t it in, ‘Maltese Falcon’ where Spade is in a bar and the sign reads:
Genuine
American and Canadian
Whiskeys
Bottled in Bond
And Spade muses to himself:
‘…not a single word on the ad was true’
I wanted to quote this today, but find it largely unknown. Is it in ‘Big Knockover’ or something?