THE MALTESE FALCON and the origins of pulp film

In the 1960's, I discovered Raymond Chandler’s books. I bought and read everything I could get my hands on. That led me to his predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, and I read all of his novels and many of his short stories.

From there, it was a short dive to the books of James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and Nathaniel West. Back then, these men who had written popular fiction first published in pulp magazines (like “Black Mask” and “True Detective”) from the 1920's through the ‘50's, and later, in cheap paperbacks with lurid covers --- with sleazy blondes in tight sweaters and drooping eyelids, full red lips with dangling cigarettes, and graceful hands holding smoking automatics --- were being re-discovered.

At UCLA, Phillip Durham taught their work in a class on modern literature, and it was a sensation. That this trash could be labeled “Literature” was a scandal and a revelation. Parenthetically, I believe it to be one of the first breakthroughs that led to the current freedom to consider comic books and other pop phenomena as subjects for serious academic and cultural consideration.

Among their works, consider the following list: Chandler: The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye; Hammett: The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, The Dain Curse, Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce; McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; West: The Day Of The Locust, Miss Lonelyhearts.

Another writer who is overlooked is W.R. Burnett, who labored for the Studios as a screenwriter, script doctor and dialogue contributor on many films for over 30 years. He was responsible for many film noir classics. He contributed dialogue to Little Ceasar and Scarface, wrote the novels on which Huston based High Sierra and The Asphalt Jungle. He adapted Graham Greene’s This Gun For Hire and wrote Night People. He wrote Nobody Lives Forever for John Garfield, and The Racket for Robert Mitchum.

If you recognize movie titles, you have solved half of the mystery of their importance.

They wrote about crime in cities among characters who had a resemblance to people we could believe really existed. Violence and sin were exciting: sex, greed, cruelty, perversion, were all openly shown with crackling hip wit and wise winks. Mean streets, hotels, alleys, nightclubs, bars, apartments, and the mansions of the nasty spoiled rich were the settings. All the action occurred in the black and gray shadows of nighttime in the city. The crimes and sins of the characters were going to be revealed and sometimes even committed by a tough hero, who might be a detective and later, would evolve into a sucker for a dame.

Hammett and then Chandler wrote private detective stories, in which the hero could be shady and walk slightly outside of the often corrupt legal establishment to achieve justice. The culprits were often women who were as tough as the men, sometimes tougher. They exposed the underside of the gender upheavals of the early 20th century: the sexual liberation of the Twenties and the Depression had created feminine ideals who were independent, scheming for a share of the swag, and using men as pawns to get ahead.

The French would recognize them from their models in literature as femmes fatales and by that label they would be forever known. After World War II, Cain wrote novels in which the femmes overwhelmed the heroes, whose ideals had been shorn by Depression and war, and lured them to destruction with promise of sexual greed. These anti-heroes had little of the nobility of the previous working detectives, but retained their appealing sexual adventurousness and hipness. They were often men bored with ordinary lives and wanted passion, even if it cost their lives.

When Hollywood discovered the formula, they made movies dark and erotic, which the American critics called cheap and tawdry B movies, and which French critics who loved them called Art and gave them a genre: Film Noir. The influence of this style on popular culture has been enormous, shaping our entertainment and ideas of Cool probably for good.

The Maltese Falcon and Cool

In 1998 The American Film Institute produced a list of the 100 greatest American films of the century. The controversial list defined “greatness” by several standards, including of course commercial success. By such measure, the vastly overrated and hopelessly dated Gone With The Wind was rated 4th. However, the list includes some films that are undeniably “great,” and The Maltese Falcon is one of them, number 23.

For my money, this film is rated far too low. Falcon is great by any standard, but the one that most interests me at the moment is its influence on popular culture.

The novel was published in 1929, the motion picture released in 1941. Its impact was immediate, widespread, and longlasting. Even today, filmmakers continue to draw from the ideas, images, concepts, mood, that the work embodies. Roman Polanski’s modern classic, Chinatown, of course, owes much of its mood, ideas and setting to this film and the genre it elevated to a form of art.

[Huston's version was the 3rd remake of the novel. In 1931, Roy Del Ruth directed a decent version starring Ricardo Cortez as Spade. In 1936, another version, SATAN MET A LADY, was a disaster despite Bette Davis as the femme. ]

The Coen’s 1990 Miller’s Crossing is based on elements from two Hammett novels, Red Harvest and The Glass Key. Tarantino’s work inherits the hard-boiled attitude toward greed, sex, and violence. Graphic novelists Max Collins (The Road To Perdition and Nathan Heller), and Frank Miller (Sin City) are inheritors of the Dashiell Hammett / John Huston / Humphrey Bogart genetic code.

The persona of “Sam Spade,” as created by the former private eye Hammett and personified by Bogart, has influenced our concept of Cool for the generations. Spade is the spiritual father of “James Bond,” the screen personas of such anti-heroes as Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson Jean Paul Belmondo, Clint Eastwood.

Harrison Ford has said that George Lucas’ direction to him in the bar scene introducing Han Solo in Star Wars was to “think Bogart.”

The dominance of the anti-hero ideal goes so far in our consciousness that it is hard to imagine Hip-hop gangstas, dark superheroes like Batman and the other tragically secret identity nerds without reference to the Spade paradigm. The influence of this ideal upon the whole of post-modern literature and popular culture is incalculable.

What is there about this novel, movie and character that we find so attractive and pertinent to our values?

Greg points out that Spade is “sentimental” in the sense that he “does the right thing,” that is the legal, conventional thing, by solving the crime, avenging his partner, and turning in the killer, even though he was attracted to her.

Yet, Spade can also be seen as “unsentimental’ in the sense that he gives up the possibility of love for work and duty. The climax of both novel and film is the asserted denial of sentimentality: “I won’t play the sap for you,” he tells Brigid, the girl with the pure sweet face and lying eyes, as he turns her in.

He is the ultimate recalcitrant male, rejecting feminine soft-headed notions like passionate emotional attachment for the manly ideals of loneliness, honor, and work. This is the quintessence of between-the-wars masculine ethic, exemplified in Camus’ existentialism, Hemingway’s self-proclaimed dedication to his “work” and politics, and Hammett’s lonely alcoholic sadness.

Whatever the case, Spade is not merely the template for all private eyes of the hardboiled variety. He is sadistic, attractive, on the edge of the law, unpredictable, risky, tough, smart. Through his portrayal of this character, Bogie solidified his status as the standard of Cool, which so impressed the French New Wave.

In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard’s first film, Breathless, shows Belmondo (as near a physical match as the French could find) near a Bogart movie poster. He brushes his finger across his lips to imitate his hero, whispers “Bogie.”

Pauline Kael writes:

“Godard ... saw something in the cheap American gangster movies of his youth that French movies lacked; he poeticized it and made it so modern (via fast jump cutting) that he, in turn, became the key influence on American movies of the 60s. Here, he brought together disharmonious elements—irony and slapstick and defeat—and brought the psychological effects of moviegoing into the movie itself. (His hero was probably the first to imitate Bogart.)”

This comment in a Roger Ebert review could apply to any post-modern independent movie:

“To describe the plot in a linear and logical fashion is almost impossible. That doesn't matter. The movie is essentially a series of conversations punctuated by brief, violent interludes. It's all style. It isn't violence or chases, but the way the actors look, move, speak and embody their characters. Under the style is attitude: Hard men, in a hard season, ... are motivated by greed and capable of murder ...

“Everything there is to know about Sam Spade is contained in the scene where Bridget asks for his help and he criticizes her performance: 'You're good. It's chiefly your eyes, I think--and that throb you get in your voice when you say things like, 'be generous, Mr. Spade.'

''He always stands outside, sizing things up. Few Hollywood heroes before 1941 kept such a distance from the conventional pieties of the plot.”

Kael’s take on Sam Spade:

“Bogart played him as written by Hammett, and Hammett was not sentimental about detectives: they were cops who were going it alone, i.e., who had smartened up and become more openly mercenary and crooked. Bogart's Spade is a loner who uses nice, simple people. He's a man who's constantly testing himself, who doesn't want to be touched ....”

The movie vs the novel:
Huston’s film does have a few minor flaws, which became clear to me after about 50 screenings — as in the best movies, it can be enjoyed that many times. The tension in the plot depends on the audience’s doubt about whether Spade loves Brigid enough to suspect that she is a killer, and whether he will protect her even after he has figured it out.

Hampered by the morality code then in effect in movies, Huston is forced to merely imply intimacy the night Cairo and the police leave Spade’s apartment after Brigid sighs about not knowing what is a lie. Spade seems taken with her vulnerability, leans over to kiss her, she pliantly raises her lips, he hesitates to look out the window to see the danger lurking in the street.

The next scene the morning after in Spade’s office reveals the change. Brigid now calls him “Darling,” he caresses her gently, calls her (somewhat unconvincingly) “My own true love,” and arranges for Effie to take her home to protect her.

This is one case in which a passionate sex scene would have definitely helped. It would have made the payoff speech: “Maybe you love me and maybe I love you ... I won't because all of me wants to and you counted on that... I’ll have some sleepless nights when I send you over, but that’ll pass ... You’ll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years. I’ll be waiting for you ...” even more chilling than it is.

In the novel (published in 1929), Hammett was far more explicit than the film about the love scene, though, of course, he stopped short of a literal sex scene. At the end of Chapter 9 of the novel, this is how Hammett described the evening scene [note how the script used the dialogue]:

“Her eyelids drooped. ‘Oh, I’m so tired,’ she said tremulously, ‘so tired of it all, of myself, of lying and thinking up lies, and of not knowing what is a lie and what is the truth. I wish I—’ She put her hands up to Spade’s cheeks, put her open mouth hard against his mouth, her body flat against his body. Spade’s arms went around her, holding her to him, muscles bulging his blue sleeves, hand cradling her head, its fingers half lost among red hair, a hand moving, groping fingers over her slim back. His eyes burned yellowly.”

The next chapter begins with Spade leaving Brigid in his bed and searching her apartment, returning to make them breakfast. The dialogue leaves no doubt of the change in their relationship and what happened the night before. The final scene in the novel, which Huston eliminated, goes this way. Spade enters his office the morning after turning Brigid over to the police. He cheerily greets Effie, who is reading the newspaper. She asks him if the report is correct. He affirms it. Hammett writes:

"... His face was pasty in color, but its lines were strong and cheerful and his eyes, though still somewhat red-veined, were clear. The girl’s [Effie’s] brown eyes were peculiarly enlarged and there was a queer twist to her mouth. She stood beside him, staring down at him. He raised his head, grinned, and said mockingly, ‘So much for your woman’s intuition.’

"Her voice was as queer as the expression on her face. ‘You did that, Sam, to her?’

He nodded. ‘Your Sam’s a detective.’ He looked sharply at her. He put his arm around her waist, his hand on her hip. ‘She did kill Miles, angel,’ he said gently, ‘offhand, like that.’ He snapped his fingers.

"She escaped from his arm as if he had hurt her. ‘Don’t, please, don’t touch me,’ she said brokenly. ‘I know— I know you’re right. You’re right. But don’t touch me now— not now.’

"Spade’s face became pale as his collar....”

[Effie quickly leaves the office, and returns to tell him that Iva, Miles Archer’s widow, has come in.]

"‘Yes, he said, and shivered. ‘Well, send her in.’"

The entire final passage is an affirmation of The Code which precludes sentiment over doing what Greg called “the right thing.” Effie’s reaction is the feminine one, expressing the ideal that love and emotional attachments are more important than logic and duty. Spade’s adherence to his code and refusal to be permanently swayed by emotion is what makes him one of the most attractive, yet terrifying “heroic” characters in literature.

The significance of this character in contemporary popular culture and fiction is obvious. One need only think of the other important heroes it was a model for. I am thinking particularly of the spy hero, such as James Bond, who represents the Cold War inheritor of the pre-World War II hard boiled private eye.

He too is sadistic, cold, calculating, eschews sentiment while keeping his eye on the prize: the winning of his personal battle against the enemy. He is ardently sexist, uses females without concern for emotional attachment. He is anti-authoritarian while still managing to be a member of, while he uses, the Establishment. His superiors treat him as a pariah, disavowing his excesses, while he barely tolerates their rules, bending them when it suits his goals. He has style and that is more important than the mere achievement of result, a hallmark of post-modern heroism as exemplified in our sports and music idols.

These characteristics are reminiscent of Spade and his successor Phillip Marlowe, derivative of their outrageous rebellion. Bond could not have existed without them. Neither could any of the rebellious “anti-heroes” of the 60's. Brando in any of his guises, Nicholson, McQueen, Bronson, Eastwood, all owe their attraction to the core of Bogart’s definition of the eccentric loner he vividly embodied.

It is just a small stretch to see hip hop and rapping anti-heroes of contemporary culture and fiction as inheritors of this mantle. Comic book superheroes, including Batman, Superman, and the other tragically lonely secret identity nerds owe much to this paradigm.

That this anti-authoritarian rebel who nonetheless maintains his own strict code of ethics holds magnetic universal appeal to each restless generation shouldn't be a shock. Nor should it be discouraged. Though Sam Spade coolly chooses duty over love, we sense that his Code might lead him to a higher "nobility" which might inspire selflessness, passion and romantic love.

In fact, the very next year after The Maltese Falcon was released, Bogart was steered into Casablanca, in which "Rick Blaine," the hard-boiled saloon keeper who "sticks his neck out for nobody" is persuaded to sacrifice: first, his manly solitude - for passionate love for Ingrid Bergman (the anti-femme fatale), then, to give her up - in favor of "The Cause."

But that's another story ...