Hamburg Noir

HISTORY

The Maltese Falcon

Book
The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett, 1930)

Film
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)

A former Pinkerton detective, Dashiell Hammett all but invented the hardboiled crime novel. Humphrey Bogart made it a Hollywood legend.

The year before its publication in book form, The Maltese Falcon was a five-part serial in Black Mask magazine. This was at the beginning of the Great Depression, when people often had to choose between spending a dime on a meal or a magazine. Thanks to hardboiled pulp writers like Hammett, many chose the magazine.

As the story begins, Sam Spade, a not entirely reputable private detective in San Francisco, takes on a missing persons case from a stunning walk-in client named Ruth Wonderly. As he later tells her: “We didn’t exactly believe your story, Miss Wonderly. We believed your 200 dollars. I mean, you paid us more than if you had been telling us the truth, and enough more to make it all right.”

When Spade’s partner is killed, he has mixed emotions. On the one hand, he was having a affair with his partner’s wife. He’s not proud of it, but that doesn’t stop him from immediately ordering his secretary to change the name on the door from “Spade and Archer” to “Samuel Spade.” On the other hand, he knows he has to find the killer: “When somebody kills your partner, you're supposed to do something.” He says it’s bad for business to let the murderer get away, but you sense there’s more too it. Spade is a heel with remnants of a conscience. As such, he’s the prototype for the hardboiled detectives who followed him in fiction.

Spade’s investigation of his own client leads him to a motley band of thieves who have been crisscrossing the globe to get their hands on a jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon dating back to sixteenth-century Spain. The thieves go to a lot of trouble to stop the detective, at one point slipping him a mickey and kicking him viciously. Meanwhile, local homicide detectives accuse him of murder twice: once for his partner, once for their prime suspect in his partner’s murder. Spade mocks their illogic, while behaving vaguely guilty.

Through dogged determination -- and dumb luck -- he eventually locates the falcon, which he then attempts to sell to the thieves. Until the end, it’s not clear whether he wants the substantial finder’s fee or justice for his partner’s murder.

A decade after the book was published, it was adapted into a film by John Huston, who wrote and directed it. The cast is equally impressive. It’s led by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, followed by top-shelf character actors. The lovely Mary Astor plays Miss Wonderly (renamed Brigid O'Shaughnessy), Peter Lorre plays the slippery Joel Cairo, Sidney Greenstreet plays Kasper (“Fat Man”) Gutman, the brains of the operation, and Elisha Cook Jr. plays his small-stature enforcer, Wilmer Cook, who Bogart torments throughout. For good measure, the film was produced by Warner Brothers, known as the “gangster studio.” (The following year, Warner released Casablanca, which featured Bogart, Lorre, and Gutman again, this time in North Africa.)

The stellar cast transforms the straightforward book into a wildly entertaining film that sometimes borders on comedy. Bogart’s Spade drawls one-liners that would be comfortable in almost any of his other films: “You're a good man, sister.” Astor’s O'Shaughnessy does an excellent job of staying in character as a chronic liar with false humility covering nerves of steel. Lorre’s Cairo makes an art form of teasing the Hays Code with lavish mannerisms. Greenstreet’s Gutman gives out big belly laughs every time he delivers wonderfully circular statements: “I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.” And Cook is the natural fall guy. The actors’ accents -- some real, some contrived -- highlight the unique qualities of their characters.

All told, the book and its film adaptation set the gold standard for hardboiled detective fiction and film noir: an overly complicated plot, a fast-talking private detective who get knocked out cold, a femme fatale who tries with limited success to lead him astray, and a suave but ruthless crime boss who thinks like a business executive.

The book and film tell a good story well without taking themselves too seriously. This lack of self-consciousness allows readers and audiences to sit back and enjoy the ride.