Maltese Falcon, The (DVD)

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WB's latest set of Bogart films must be the third or fourth such collection now available on DVD. This one, called the "Humphrey Bogart Signature Collection, Volume II," contains five films that Bogart made for Warner Bros. between 1941 and 1944. Four of them are exclusive to the set: "Across the Pacific" (1942), "All Through the Night" (1942), "Action in the North Atlantic" (1943), and "Passage to Marseille" (1944). The prize of the lot, however, is Bogart's breakthrough film, "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), which WB have accorded a Three-Disc Special Edition, available in the big box or on its own.

If "The Maltese Falcon" doesn't qualify as the best private-eye yarn ever filmed, I don't know what does. Hollywood had brought Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel twice to the screen before this one (as you'll see below), but never better. John Huston, in his directorial debut in 1941, also adapted the script for this fast-paced mystery; and Humphrey Bogart practically bought the rights not only to the character of Sam Spade but to every future movie gumshoe who would ever pull a gat. In fitting tribute to the best, Warner Home Video's DVD transfer of the film is truly "the stuff that dreams are made of."

For Bogart, detective Sam Spade was a breakthrough part. Consigned mainly to play second-fiddle tough-guy roles in the thirties, Bogart had usually played heavies who died in the final reel. He did get good notices as Duke Mantee in "The Petrified Forest" (1936) and Mad Dog Earle in "High Sierra" (1941), but he was mostly getting plugged at the end of things like "Angels With Dirty Faces" (1938), "The Roaring Twenties" (1939), and "The Return of Doctor X" (1939). When he finally got his chance to play the lead in "The Maltese Falcon," he never looked back. The next year it was "Casablanca," and he had firmly etched his star into Hollywood's roster of all-time favorite actors.

As Sam Spade, the hard-boiled detective, Bogart is the quintessential antihero. He is the loner with no particularly noble ambitions or romanticized notions. He is an ironclad realistic. When somebody murders his partner, he shrugs it off as part of the job. Everybody knows the risks. And when it comes to love and women, he is equally pragmatic. Bogart may have become the world's leading actor, but he would remain the cynical tough guy throughout his career, right up to his last, wry performance some fifteen years later in "The Harder They Fall."

"The Maltese Falcon" is a story of double-dealing and double crosses in the search for a fabulous "black bird." The object of all the mischief is a fabulous, jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon that has had people cheating, stealing, and killing to get their hands on it for over 400 years. Now, a new group of scoundrels are after it, and their trail has led them to San Francisco and the investigative agency of Spade and Archer. "Trust no one" should be the byword of everyone in the story and the caution to anyone who watches the film. Lies, treachery, deceit, and homicide are the order of the day as nearly all the characters in the movie try to stab one another in the back in their greed for the bird.

The supporting cast were so good together that WB invited many of them back to costar in later Bogart films. Mary Astor plays Brigid O'Shaughnessy (or is it Wonderly, or Leblanc?), whose lies seem to mystify even her. Peter Lorre is Joel Cairo, the weaselly, effeminate little crook who would sell out his mother for the right price. Sydney Greenstreet is the Fat Man, Kasper Gutman, the urbane heavy (really heavy) imitated in about 200 movies since. (The film's closing credits spell it "Kasper," but Hammett spelled it "Casper" in the book.) Elisha Cook, Jr., plays the young-punk gunsel, whose felt hat and twin automatics are bigger than he is. Ward Bond and Barton MacLane are the cops, the sympathetic Detective Polhaus and the hard-nosed Lt. Dundy, forever hounding Spade. Jerome Cowan plays Spade's partner, the dandy Miles Archer. Gladys George plays Archer's wife, with whom Spade has been carrying on an affair. And Lee Patrick is Effie Perine, Spade's ever-loyal secretary and assistant. The director even talked his father, actor Walter Huston, into playing a brief, unbilled bit part as Capt. Jacobi, master of the boat "La Paloma," a fellow shot in the chest and still clutching the falcon in his dying grasp. Apparently as a joke, the elder Huston required his son take hours of retakes for his moment of screen time.

The dialogue crackles in Huston's script--as it should, taken almost verbatim from the novel--and the direction is secure and taut. Critics often credit Huston and "The Maltese Falcon" with starting, or at least popularizing, the film noir style so favored by crime flicks of the later forties and fifties. The "Falcon's" city setting, frequently photographed at night, its murky shadows, and its grim, derisive attitude toward people and their motivations all influence our dark perceptions of the story. Yet it is not a depressing motion picture despite its surplus of shady characters and suspicious events. Huston doesn't allow it. The film's vitality and pacing do not permit us to ponder for long the consequences of any one scene or action. Instead, we're caught up in the pulse of the film, pretty much swept along by its deeds, not even particularly saddened or surprised by the pessimism of its ending.

Trivia notes: According to John Eastman in his book "Retakes" (Ballantine Books, New York, 1989), "the lead role of Sam Spade was originally offered to George Raft, who turned it down because of his reluctance to work with an untried director. Geraldine Fitzgerald refused Mary Astor's role for the same reason. Portly stage actor Sydney Greenstreet, nervous and insecure in his first screen role, weighed 285 pounds at the time.... Appearing only briefly in the film, the 18-inch falcon statuette was actually one of seven duplicate figurines made as spare props, one of which made headlines in 1974 by being stolen from a Los Angeles art museum."