The Maltese Bippy

Some of us rate John Huston's THE MALTESE FALCON as the best private eye film of all time. It was a forerunner of film noir, introducing for the first time the murderous young beauty to detective movies. The spare prose was excellent in a minimalist way. Sam Spade was totally hard boiled, and I loved the ending, in which you realize that Spade knew the killer as soon as he saw his partner's body. But until recently I had only watched the third version, the classic Bogart and John Huston remake, which came out about 1941.  Recently I watched the first two versions, and it was informative.

The original THE MALTESE FALCON came out in 1931 and starred Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez. In this movie and in the first remake, the actress got top billing. Una Merkel played Effie. Spade is portrayed as a smart-mouthed, jovial womanizing dude, and the secondary roles are fairly well cast (you can't help comparing them to the brilliant cast of the Bogart film). This movie was shot before the Hollywood Sex Code came into effect, so the interaction seems a bit like a modern film. It's worth seeing for fun, if you get a chance. The next version was very loosely based on the novel, and it was titled SATAN MEETS A  LADY (I think).  This 1936 film stars Bette Davis (!) and Warren William as a smirking dude out for the money and sexual favors. A young Marie Wilson makes a memorable Effie. A stout woman takes what we consider the  Sidney Greenstreet role.

In the second remake, the one we all know, Bogart brings gravitas to Spade. The character actors exude genuine menace. John Huston wrote and directed--this was the first film he directed--and the tale of how he wrote the script is worth summarizing. In those studio days, the first step in bringing a novel to the screen was to ask a secretary to type up the entire novel, word for word, in a screenplay format. Huston asked a secretary to do that. And then what the secretary had typed (unedited, not worked on) was accidentally sent to the head of the studio, who okayed it. My guess is that Huston made a few changes later, but his version remains remarkably faithful to the book.