The Maltese Falcon
Three species of the famed blackbird appear in a new DVD set
As you subject your DVD player to the two earlier versions of The Maltese Falcon - the 1931 version with the now forgotten Ricardo Cortez and 1936's Satan Met A Lady, both part of a handsome new 3 disc re-issue, also featuring documentaries, trailers and interesting radio adaptations - you may feel like Sidney Greenstreet's Casper Gutman discovering that the elusive bird he's been pursuing is made of led - for they are pale imitations, to say the least, not only of Dashiell Hammett's famed book but of writer-director John Huston's definitive interpretation.
So singularly uninteresting are they, in fact (despite the presence in Satan of powerhouse Bette Davis), that their only true value are as agents of elucidation, underlining Huston's talents all the more.
Huston's Falcon is a masterful example of good film technique, a testament to the combination of instinct and fear that led to sound pre-production choices.
As a writer, Huston was wise enough to recognize the inherent pace in Hammett's dialogue; Huston's version retains more Hammett-speak than any of the previous attempts. As a first-time director, he was nervous enough to storyboard the entire film, thus unleashing his painter's pedigree on to the big screen. The result is a conversion of what had been, on others' hands, a talky, immobile property into a first-rate detective yarn/melodrama that moves at the pace of a gunsel on the heels of his mark. The film's many verbal volleys - in duos, trios and quartets - reminds one of Clifford Odets' golden advice on how to deal with voluminous exposition: "Don't play the dialogue. Play the situations - and play them fast", while Huston's camera, permanently set at an angle lower than normal and operating at a nervous pace, makes even standard film grammar like two shots and triangular compositions images of lasting memory.
Huston's best work in the film may well be its terrific if talky climax: the triple whammy of a game of human Russian Roulette, in which Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade toys with whom to offer up for the murders associated with the pursuit of the bird, the voracious unraveling and authentication of the objet d'art, and the chilling cling to justice Bogey exhibits, in Karloffian close-up no less, when he snubs the possibility of love with Mary Astor's Brigid O'Shaughnessy for the lonely victory of respecting the law.
Though Huston's Falcon has long been recognized as having one of the finest ensemble casts in movie history, it is Bogart -and not simply because he has the most to do - who is the uncontested stand-out.
He had had an earlier, limited career in movies. By the time of Falcon,he was in early middle age, leading a life burdened by ex wives, a drinking problem, even the possibility of losing his on-screen look (he wears a toupee in the film) - factors that make you wonder if the attack he took to the role wasn't fueled by a burning sense of now-or-never.
Or maybe it was simply that the part of Spade, unlike turns in other triumphs like The Petrified Forest and High Sierra, was the role that was the closest to home, the part that contained the most of his needling, outsider's real-life self in it.
Regardless, in this particular performance, we see what the generation of the sixties saw, the first sector of the public to recognize Bogart's true talent after he was written off in his own time as a generic tough-guy: film's first existential hero. It's a self-serving, anti-establishment presence he pulls off with tremendous self-confidence; Bogey's Spade is a one-man audience in a world of neurotic actors, taking sadistic delight in the inconsistencies in their performances.
He's a bemused, sometimes frustrated ringmaster in a fleabag circus of garish headliners: Peter Lorre's effete spook...Mary Astor's introspective cheat...Greenstreet's diplomatic dandy (Huston's low angles spread his stomach out like the coming of the dusk)...and Elisha Cook's cautious creep.
Bogey is a tight-lipped, sad-faced, flat-topped loner, an emotional fatalist traveling solo through a world of neurotic dreamers; a proud believer in the disposability of partnerships, women, and human life. His only true values are getting the job done, making a decent buck every now and again, and enjoying a good cigar.
He is, in effect, the perfect expression of John Huston, the hard-working auteur with the ever-present Panatella, who, starting with Falcon and continuing well over the next four decades, stood successfully separate from the Hollywood hackery.
Huston was, as he proves with his version of The Maltese Falcon, the antithesis of Gutman's find: the real McCoy.
