Three Maltese Inflections
Aug. 3rd, 2008 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersIn the wake of the discussion of film noir here last weekend, I decided to watch all three versions of The Maltese Falcon on the special edition DVD that Warner Bros released a couple of years ago. I had seen the 1941 version with Bogart at least a couple of times before, including on the big screen at least once at a repertory theater in the days before home video, but I hadn't seen the other two.
The 1931 version, starring Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, is very similar to the 1941 version scriptwise. Since it's a pre-Code movie, Sam Spade is allowed to be more of a womanizing heel than he is in the later version, and there's a lot more overt sexuality in general. It's closer to the novel in these aspects. All the same, there's a tacked-on ending in which Spade visits Ms. Wonderly in the jail and reveals he's taken a new job that is completely unbelievable and out-of-character for him. The pace of the movie isn't as sharp as the 1941 version, but otherwise it's a very entertaining interpretation in its own right, aside from that ending. Fascinating to see how two very similar scripts can be treated so differently. Also fascinating to see an early film interpretation of the hard-boiled private detective, which hadn't become a convention yet.
The 1936 version is called Satan Met a Lady, and it changes all the names and turns the falcon maguffin into the horn of Roland. The tone of this version is comedic, almost farcical. Unfortunately, the tone is also fairly uneven, as are some of the performances, most importantly that of Warren William as Ted Shayne, the Sam Spade character. Nonetheless, there are some lines of dialogue from this version that were used in the 1941 version too, and despite the numerous changes, many of the same story details surface over the short course (72 minutes) of the film. You also get a bottle-blonde Bette Davis, and a nice mugging performance by Alison Skipworth as a female version of the Casper Gutman character. The quality of the image for this movie is the worst of the three on the DVD, which is a shame, because one of the other things it shares with the 1941 version is cinematography by the great Arthur Edeson.
Coming to the 1941 version after seeing these earlier versions, and several years and hundreds of movies since the last time I saw it, the thing that struck me the most was Edeson's visual style. Edeson, although an American, was one of the figures who developed the German expressionist style into film noir style, via gothic horror. The 1926 old dark house picture, The Bat (an influence on the comicbook Batman), shows him using the expressionist style, which he then took into an almost abstract direction in James Whale's Old Dark House (1932). He also photographed Whale's Frankenstein (1931), which isn't quite as dark but features a lot of low angle shots and low key lighting. By the time he got to The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca (1942), he had created an incredibly sophisticated look -- "painting with light," in John Alton's phrase. One thing I noticed in The Maltese Falcon is that he would take lattices of light produced by venetian blinds and use them as abstract ornaments completely removed from their source, including one that is used to frame Spade's head as he's talking to somebody offscreen with nary a window in sight. In scenes in darkened rooms, Edeson manages to outline figures in different gradations of faint light that allow us to make out where everyone and everything is in relation to each other, while reducing them to dark featureless shapes at the same time.
Many of the shots are looking up, as in the userpic on this post, so that figures are distorted and looming. While the tone of this movie is relatively tame compared to the more psychological noirs, there's an effective undercurrent of tension and uncertainty. I had never liked Mary Astor's performance as the femme fatale before, but now that I've seen some of her other movies (including Preston Sturges' comedy, Palm Beach Story from the same year, in which she plays a completely different character), I saw it with new eyes this time. I think part of what put me off the performance before is simply that she's playing a very unlikeable character (as is everybody else). What's impressive is that she's playing a character so deceptive that she doesn't even know herself. There's no identity there, no core, just a succession of extemporized masks. Astor is playing a chameleon, and she's so good at it that, unlike Bogart's mannered interpretation of Spade (very fitting for this highly stylized movie), you don't notice what she's doing.
This is also the first time I've looked at the story as an artifact of the pulps. The backstory of the falcon as an object of treasure could have come from an Orientalist adventure, perhaps one of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories or a planetary romance by Leigh Brackett, where the falcon would be an ancient superscientific device that legend says allowed personality transfers. The cast of grotesques chasing the falcon are familiar pulp characters too. It was terrific, by the way, to see Dwight Frye's nearly wordless psychotic gunsel, Wilmer, in the 1931 version. I've always been a big fan of Elisha Cook Jr's performance in that role in the 1941 version -- thus the userpic -- but Dwight Frye, who is familiar from Universal horror films such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein, is perfect too. Never imagined that Wilmer had so much in common with Renfield!
The 1931 version, starring Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, is very similar to the 1941 version scriptwise. Since it's a pre-Code movie, Sam Spade is allowed to be more of a womanizing heel than he is in the later version, and there's a lot more overt sexuality in general. It's closer to the novel in these aspects. All the same, there's a tacked-on ending in which Spade visits Ms. Wonderly in the jail and reveals he's taken a new job that is completely unbelievable and out-of-character for him. The pace of the movie isn't as sharp as the 1941 version, but otherwise it's a very entertaining interpretation in its own right, aside from that ending. Fascinating to see how two very similar scripts can be treated so differently. Also fascinating to see an early film interpretation of the hard-boiled private detective, which hadn't become a convention yet.
The 1936 version is called Satan Met a Lady, and it changes all the names and turns the falcon maguffin into the horn of Roland. The tone of this version is comedic, almost farcical. Unfortunately, the tone is also fairly uneven, as are some of the performances, most importantly that of Warren William as Ted Shayne, the Sam Spade character. Nonetheless, there are some lines of dialogue from this version that were used in the 1941 version too, and despite the numerous changes, many of the same story details surface over the short course (72 minutes) of the film. You also get a bottle-blonde Bette Davis, and a nice mugging performance by Alison Skipworth as a female version of the Casper Gutman character. The quality of the image for this movie is the worst of the three on the DVD, which is a shame, because one of the other things it shares with the 1941 version is cinematography by the great Arthur Edeson.
Coming to the 1941 version after seeing these earlier versions, and several years and hundreds of movies since the last time I saw it, the thing that struck me the most was Edeson's visual style. Edeson, although an American, was one of the figures who developed the German expressionist style into film noir style, via gothic horror. The 1926 old dark house picture, The Bat (an influence on the comicbook Batman), shows him using the expressionist style, which he then took into an almost abstract direction in James Whale's Old Dark House (1932). He also photographed Whale's Frankenstein (1931), which isn't quite as dark but features a lot of low angle shots and low key lighting. By the time he got to The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca (1942), he had created an incredibly sophisticated look -- "painting with light," in John Alton's phrase. One thing I noticed in The Maltese Falcon is that he would take lattices of light produced by venetian blinds and use them as abstract ornaments completely removed from their source, including one that is used to frame Spade's head as he's talking to somebody offscreen with nary a window in sight. In scenes in darkened rooms, Edeson manages to outline figures in different gradations of faint light that allow us to make out where everyone and everything is in relation to each other, while reducing them to dark featureless shapes at the same time.
Many of the shots are looking up, as in the userpic on this post, so that figures are distorted and looming. While the tone of this movie is relatively tame compared to the more psychological noirs, there's an effective undercurrent of tension and uncertainty. I had never liked Mary Astor's performance as the femme fatale before, but now that I've seen some of her other movies (including Preston Sturges' comedy, Palm Beach Story from the same year, in which she plays a completely different character), I saw it with new eyes this time. I think part of what put me off the performance before is simply that she's playing a very unlikeable character (as is everybody else). What's impressive is that she's playing a character so deceptive that she doesn't even know herself. There's no identity there, no core, just a succession of extemporized masks. Astor is playing a chameleon, and she's so good at it that, unlike Bogart's mannered interpretation of Spade (very fitting for this highly stylized movie), you don't notice what she's doing.
This is also the first time I've looked at the story as an artifact of the pulps. The backstory of the falcon as an object of treasure could have come from an Orientalist adventure, perhaps one of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories or a planetary romance by Leigh Brackett, where the falcon would be an ancient superscientific device that legend says allowed personality transfers. The cast of grotesques chasing the falcon are familiar pulp characters too. It was terrific, by the way, to see Dwight Frye's nearly wordless psychotic gunsel, Wilmer, in the 1931 version. I've always been a big fan of Elisha Cook Jr's performance in that role in the 1941 version -- thus the userpic -- but Dwight Frye, who is familiar from Universal horror films such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein, is perfect too. Never imagined that Wilmer had so much in common with Renfield!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 11:37 pm (UTC)Which reminds me that I was thinking Satan Met a Lady shared a certain tone with The Thin Man, the movie, which had come out a couple of years before. Made me wonder if Satan Met a Lady was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of The Thin Man, which is of course another adaptation of Hammett.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 06:24 pm (UTC)According to Otto Penzler's introduction to Pulp Fiction: The Crimefighters (2006), the hardboiled PI made his debut in Carroll John Daly's "Three Gun Terry", published in Black Mask, 15 May 1923. Daly subsequently created Race Williams, the genre's first continuing character.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 06:30 pm (UTC)"Three Gun Terry," huh? That's more guns than hands!
no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 07:46 pm (UTC)Read Red Harvest last year and was stunned at its bleak amorality.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 03:12 pm (UTC)If you ever do dig up your post, please let me know.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 10:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-05 02:04 pm (UTC)I was rather amused by your observations that the falcon could be "an ancient superscientific device", as that's exactly what it is the long running role-playing game I'm involved in. It's really an "Atlantean" device, though "Atlantis" was a highly advanced planet with links to Earth. This, of course, means the solid gold falcon is actually a fake as it doesn't have any of the useful psychic abilities of the "real" one. Oh, and Fu Manchu was after it.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-05 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-05 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-05 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-05 03:47 pm (UTC)