October 3, 1941—For once, Hollywood got a remake right, as John Huston, noticing the potential in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon that two prior directors missed, turned this seminal hard-boiled detective novel into cinematic gold.The film, which premiered in New York City on this date, marked the film debut of Huston, a screenwriter who, after seeing how star Paul Muni altered his script for Juarez, vowed to have more control over his work in the future.
Here’s the ironic thing, though: the property that made his career was not really his. It’s not simply that this was an adaptation of a novel by someone else, but that his script changed nary a thing in it.
Huston followed the advice of director Howard Hawks--"Film the book"--so closely that he had his secretary simply type the novel out as a screenplay before submitting it at Warner Brothers. It ended up filmed substantially in that manner. In fact, the neophyte screenwriter might have spent more time on storyboarding (two days) than he did on the script.
I haven’t seen the two prior versions of the film from 1931 and 1936. According to Roger Dooley’s encyclopedia survey of American film in the 1930s, From Scarlett to Scarface, the first was fine but the second (Satan Met a Lady) execrable--so bad that Bette Davis, one of the stars, went into one of her epic pitched battles with Warner Bros. over it.
To provide something of a good-luck charm for the remake, the director’s father, Walter Huston, transitioning from leading man to character actor, made an uncredited cameo appearance as Captain Jacoby. Seven years later, the son would return the favor to his father with a more substantial role, an aging miner in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which netted Walter a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
Aside from brilliance on its own terms, the movie also began a fruitful collaboration between the director and star Humphrey Bogart. Indeed, it is crucial in the evolution of this icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
High Sierra, released earlier in the year, tweaked the gangster stereotype in which Bogie had been imprisoned, allowing audiences to see his character as human for a change. The Maltese Falcon provided the actor with a forum to show that he could play more than just gangsters. For those audiences who still had a hard time imagining Bogart on the side of the angels, though, The Maltese Falcon made his character, Sam Spade, rough-edged, cynical, and willing to lie while staying barely within the law. Without the box-office credibility that The Maltese Falcon provided, it’s difficult to imagine Bogart getting the chance to play the romantic lead in Casablanca—or, indeed, to ring the many subtle inflections in his characters that would mark his career from then on up to his untimely demise from cancer in 1957.
Huston and Bogart were kindred spirits, men who liked their whiskey and their women even as they tried to live by their own code of honesty. In all, they would make six films—not just hugely popular classics such as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen, but one of the great offbeat films that it would take later generations to appreciate, Beat the Devil (1954).
Somehow, though, this post wouldn’t be complete without considering the film’s femme fatale, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and the actress who played her, Mary Astor.
The first thing to consider is the character’s name: About as Irish as you can get, which fascinates me because of my own family background. None of the films made from Hammett’s books really beats you over the head with an Irish character’s ethnicity. But two Irish-American women played roles in his early life and career: Josephine Dolan, a young nurse whom he married in 1921, and Peggy O’Toole, his secretary-lover later in the decade, and often rumored to have at least partly inspired the creation of Brigid O’Shaughnessy.
In the first two versions of the novel, the character’s name was changed, but Huston insisted on retaining it in his version. When it came time for casting, the part almost went to an actress with an equally Irish name, Geraldine Fitzgerald. It’s interesting to think of what stamp she might have put on the role, but she rejected it, and it then went to Astor.
Both actresses already had rather checkered lives offscreen--Fitzgerald was rumored (and we know it now it for a fact, thanks to her son’s new memoir) that she bore a child out of wedlock to Orson Welles, and Astor was the subject of a headline-making divorce case in 1936 when, it was revealed, her diary went into lavish detail about her lovers. But both actresses were highly talented, and Astor would win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year for The Great Lie.
Astor’s tremendous skill didn’t shield her from the agonies of aging in Hollywood, and by the late 1950s she had cratered into a mire of alcoholism and depression. As I learned from a fascinating post on the blog Neglected Books, a Catholic priest counseling her on her treatment suggested that she write for therapy. The result was not just one memoir, but two, along with several novels that, according to this post, deserve to be reprinted.
Aside from brilliance on its own terms, the movie also began a fruitful collaboration between the director and star Humphrey Bogart. Indeed, it is crucial in the evolution of this icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
High Sierra, released earlier in the year, tweaked the gangster stereotype in which Bogie had been imprisoned, allowing audiences to see his character as human for a change. The Maltese Falcon provided the actor with a forum to show that he could play more than just gangsters. For those audiences who still had a hard time imagining Bogart on the side of the angels, though, The Maltese Falcon made his character, Sam Spade, rough-edged, cynical, and willing to lie while staying barely within the law. Without the box-office credibility that The Maltese Falcon provided, it’s difficult to imagine Bogart getting the chance to play the romantic lead in Casablanca—or, indeed, to ring the many subtle inflections in his characters that would mark his career from then on up to his untimely demise from cancer in 1957.
Huston and Bogart were kindred spirits, men who liked their whiskey and their women even as they tried to live by their own code of honesty. In all, they would make six films—not just hugely popular classics such as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen, but one of the great offbeat films that it would take later generations to appreciate, Beat the Devil (1954).
Somehow, though, this post wouldn’t be complete without considering the film’s femme fatale, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and the actress who played her, Mary Astor.
The first thing to consider is the character’s name: About as Irish as you can get, which fascinates me because of my own family background. None of the films made from Hammett’s books really beats you over the head with an Irish character’s ethnicity. But two Irish-American women played roles in his early life and career: Josephine Dolan, a young nurse whom he married in 1921, and Peggy O’Toole, his secretary-lover later in the decade, and often rumored to have at least partly inspired the creation of Brigid O’Shaughnessy.
In the first two versions of the novel, the character’s name was changed, but Huston insisted on retaining it in his version. When it came time for casting, the part almost went to an actress with an equally Irish name, Geraldine Fitzgerald. It’s interesting to think of what stamp she might have put on the role, but she rejected it, and it then went to Astor.
Both actresses already had rather checkered lives offscreen--Fitzgerald was rumored (and we know it now it for a fact, thanks to her son’s new memoir) that she bore a child out of wedlock to Orson Welles, and Astor was the subject of a headline-making divorce case in 1936 when, it was revealed, her diary went into lavish detail about her lovers. But both actresses were highly talented, and Astor would win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year for The Great Lie.
Astor’s tremendous skill didn’t shield her from the agonies of aging in Hollywood, and by the late 1950s she had cratered into a mire of alcoholism and depression. As I learned from a fascinating post on the blog Neglected Books, a Catholic priest counseling her on her treatment suggested that she write for therapy. The result was not just one memoir, but two, along with several novels that, according to this post, deserve to be reprinted.
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