The Maltese Falcon
Short description
The Maltese Falcon follows San Francisco private detective Sam Spade, whose partner Miles Archer is killed while tailing a man at the request of a woman named Brigid O'Shaughnessy. When the man being followed also turns up dead, Spade comes under suspicion and begins looking into a case that draws in several shady figures, all pursuing a valuable falcon statuette.
The film is John Huston's directorial debut, the first of the twenty-two features he directed, and he also wrote the screenplay. Humphrey Bogart plays Spade, with Mary Astor as Brigid, Gladys George as Iva Archer, Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, Barton MacLane as Lieutenant Dundy and Lee Patrick as Effie Perine, among twenty-two credited cast members. It was released in October 1941 and runs 100 minutes.
Reception has been strong across audiences and critics. On IMDb it holds 8 out of 10 from over 164,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.7 out of 10 from a much smaller number of votes. A film critics' rating of 9.2 out of 10 from 110 reviews places it above both audience scores. The worldwide box office came to about 2 million dollars. Huston's next film was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film's release had to be postponed because moral guardians insisted on softening the profanity coming from Spade’s mouth, as well as downplaying the non-traditional orientation of Fat Man, Cairo, and Wilmer (which is explicitly hinted at in the book).
- The falcon statuette made for the film was sold at auction for over $4 million in 2013.
- Humphrey Bogart’s classic line that the Maltese Falcon is made “of the stuff that dreams are made of” was ranked 14th by the American Film Institute on its list of the most memorable quotes in cinema history.
- The role of Brigid O'Shaughnessy was offered to 27-year-old Geraldine Fitzgerald. Studio executives really wanted to cast an unknown actress in this role. But Geraldine refused, and ironically, it went to movie star Mary Astor. Other candidates for the role were Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth, and Ingrid Bergman.
- The role of the MacGuffin (a valuable object that the characters are hunting for) is given to a diamond-encrusted falcon statuette. The film's artist made this prop based on the Count Knipphausen Cup from the Chatsworth House collection (made in 1697).
- The episodic role of the wounded captain who brought the falcon statuette to Spades' office was played by the director's father – Walter Huston. He did not receive a single cent for his appearance on screen.
- Two Maltese Falcon statuettes had to be made for the film – one of which Humphrey Bogart dropped during filming.
- Humphrey Bogart provided the final reference to Shakespeare.
- Robert Serber claimed in his memoirs that he named the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki "Fat Man" after one of the characters in "The Maltese Falcon".
- Production period: June 9 – July 18, 1941.
- A torn poster for the film “Swing Your Lady” (1938), in which Humphrey Bogart played the lead role, briefly appears in one of the scenes.
- A film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett (1930).
- The climactic confrontation of the five main characters lasts approximately 20 minutes, which is one-fifth of the entire film. The scene was rehearsed for a whole week, except for one day – filming fell on July 4th.
- John Huston, receiving his first directorial project, didn't complicate the script; fans of the novel note that the entire film – is practically a literal, scene-by-scene repetition of the literary source. However, he meticulously thought through every mise-en-scène, every camera movement, and every long shot. The impeccable skill of Huston and cinematographer Arthur Edeson can be seen, for example, in the seven-minute camera movement that first follows Spade and Gutman from room to room, then goes down the long hallway, then moves into the living room, then pans from left to right and stops on Spade’s drunken face. Two days were spent rehearsing this scene.
- Almost all scenes featuring Mary Astor's character contain visual hints that she will end up behind bars. She either wears striped pajamas, or striped light falls on her from the blinds, or the bars of a lattice resemble patterns on furniture, and so on.
- The working title of the film was “The Gentleman from Frisco.”
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