This Day in Film History (“The Maltese Falcon” Debuts)

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.

This Day in Film History (Hustons Find Oscar 'Treasure')

March 24, 1949—In an unprecedented—and still unrepeated—Academy Award feat, father and son Walter and John Huston won Oscars for the same film, as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre proved what other Hollywood directors/producers, with less talented relatives, had been claiming for years about nepotism: Don’t knock it till you try it.

"Many, many years ago,” Walter Huston (seen here on right, with co-stars Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt) joked as he accepted his Best Supporting Actor statuette, “I raised a son and I said to him, if you ever become a writer or director, please find a good part for your old man."

The Barrymores may have been Broadway’s “Royal Family,” as the thinly disguised 1927 dramedy by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber called them. But on film, in an unbroken string over three decades, the flame of Walter, John, Anjelica and Danny Huston has burned brighter and longer.

Both families share two things: Irish roots and troubles with substance abuse.

Maurice Barrymore, father of John, Lionel and Ethel, took his stage name from an Irish peer who had been an ancestor. Canadian-born Walter Huston was the child of Scottish and Irish parents, and John moved to Ireland in the 1950s, even becoming an Irish citizen in 1964.

The drug and alcohol addictions of the Barrymores, stretching from John and Lionel down to granddaughter Drew, have been chronicled ad nauseum by biographers and tabloids and don’t bear repeating here. Less well-known is John Huston’s rough year in 1933, when he was arrested for drunk driving twice and was involved in an auto accident that left a young woman dead. (The grand jury absolved him of blame, but he was so traumatized that he left Hollywood for a year.)

While exuding a glamour and tragic quality that have eluded the Hustons, the Barrymores have not equaled them in sustained quality of cinematic achievement.

Just consider this: Even when the films he wrote and/or directed aren’t appearing on TV, John Huston’s voice lingers in modern American film.

In White Hunter, Black Heart, Clint Eastwood tries to find a midpoint between his own steely tones and the tobacco-tarred, gin-soaked timber of Huston’s intonation, in a film that consciously echoes the older director’s experiences filming The African Queen. 

More recently, Daniel Day-Lewis may owe his Best Actor Oscar for There Will Be Blood less to his well-known physicality than to his camouflaged British accent in favor of an American one that mimicked Huston’s gravelly Noah Cross in Chinatown (another film featuring an evil capitalist who wrecks a child as much as an ecosystem).

The mysterious force of greed that seeps through Chinatown is addressed even more squarely in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. For one of the most uncompromising entries of his often-superb, always fascinating filmography, John Huston turned to his father for a pivotal role.

I’m afraid that there’s a certain breed of cinephile who ignores a film for the sole reason that it’s not in color. By definition, that deprives them of the thrill of seeing Walter Huston in action.

Smoothly seguing from vaudeville to theater to talkies, then from leading man to supporting actor, Walter Huston displayed wide range for directors as varied as D.W. Griffith (Abraham Lincoln), Frank Capra (American Madness), William Dieterle (The Devil and Daniel Webster), Michael Curtiz (Yankee Doodle Dandy), and Lewis Milestone (Rain, in a performance that keeps getting more relevant with the years, as a repressed preacher).

Now, his son posed a different challenge: dispense with his dentures to play an old prospector in John’s cinematic recasting of the novel by B. Traven (a recluse who carefully shielded his identity even as he gave permission for his story to be filmed). John judged correctly, though, that his old man wouldn’t mind the blow to his vanity so long as he could steal scenes as the wizened coot, and so he did.

Today, certain scenes in the film verge close to political incorrectness, especially when the three prospectors encounter Mexican bandits. But more often than not, the film succeeds in its multiple gambles—its location shooting south of the border (a choice that, the director shrewdly guessed, would keep Warner Bros. studio heads at arm's length), its pessimistic themes, and the casting of the three male leads. (At various times during the film’s six-year gestation, John Garfield and Ronald Reagan had been mentioned for the role that ultimately went to Tim Holt; George Raft was conceived of as greedy, murderously paranoid Fred C. Dobbs, the character ultimately played by Humphrey Bogart; and Edward G. Robinson was an early choice for Walter Huston’s part.)

Fittingly enough, John Huston capped his unexpected late-career flowering by directing daughter Anjelica in Prizzi’s Honor (gaining him an additional honor as the only filmmaker to direct a parent and child to acting Oscars) and The Dead, in which father and daughter tipped their caps to their Celtic roots, bringing to moving life the James Joyce novella about misunderstandings and family secrets. (John’s son Danny has also made his mark as a screenwriter and actor.)

Many of the best films of John Huston’s career have focused on failed dreamers and noncomformists—not just The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but also The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, Moby Dick, and The Man Who Would Be King. 

In an unhappy childhood spent shuttling between his divorced mother and father—who had decided to leave the seeming security of a job as an engineer for one as a vaudevillian—young John appeared to be collateral damage in one of these unfulfilled quests. The film he created as an adult for himself and his father provided a most un-Hustonlike happy ending after all.