James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

The photography and mise-en-scene of Huston's film also create a slightly different impression from the novel. Hammett's art is minimalist, but Huston is an expressive storyteller who likes to make statements through his images. This version of Falcon has the same art director (Robert Hass) as the original Warner adaptation, and the same photographer (Arthur Edeson) as Satan Met a Lady; nevertheless, it has a much more artfully stylized and vaguely symbolic look than either of its predecessors. Everything in the film is designed to emphasize a vivid contrast between the "masculine" ethos of Spade and the "femininity" of the villains; meanwhile, the latest developments in film stock and camera technology heighten the fetishistic qualities of the settings. Edeson (who had also photographed Frankenstein at Universal) adopts a Kane --like technique, employing a 21 mm lens to give depth and resolution to his shots. His camera is repeatedly positioned at a low level, which brings ceilings into view and creates a dynamic, foreboding sense of space. In similar fashion, his many sharp, low-angle close-ups provide a grotesque comedy: Lorre brushes the tip of his fancy walking stick across his lips; Cook's psychotic eyes brim with tears; and Greenstreet's sinister face appears just above his vast belly.

In the leading role, Humphrey Bogart establishes Spade as one of the cinema's enduring icons, but he also gives the character more psychological "depth" than Hammett had done. Sullen, brooding, and edgy, he seems obsessed with Brigid. When he kisses her for the first time, his face is twisted with anguish, and when he announces that he is turning her over to the police, he looks almost desperate. Huston reinforces this effect through his editing and rewriting of Spade's famous concluding speech to Brigid, which omits certain of Hammett's harshest lines, such as "Suppose I do [love you]? What of it? Maybe next month I won't." Here as elsewhere, the film is less skeptical, more passionate and psychologically intense than the original story. (Max Steiner's rich, sinister music score contributes to the effect; by contrast, the 1932 film version has almost no music.) Significantly, Huston deletes Spade's parable about the Flitcraft case, in part because he is less interested in the philosophical implications of the quest for the black bird than in the greed, treachery, and occasional loyalty of the various characters. The focus at the end is on Gutman's resilience as he taps a bowler hat on his head and gaily wanders off to find the real falcon; on Spade's repressed hostility as he calls the police; and on Brigid's fear as she descends in an elevator cage. This version of Falcon is an allegorical drama about the psychodynamics of masculinity, involving what James Agee called "a romanticism about danger." The falcon, like the film itself, becomes ''the stuff that dreams are made of" (a line Huston contributed), and the search for it is invested with oneiric intensity.

But if this adaptation of The Maltese Falcon is romantic, it is also strikingly witty, especially at the level of performance. Again and again, the players create their best effects from calculated understatement, employing a swift, oblique, somewhat arch style of acting. Notice, for example, the way Bogart tosses off a joke about third-degree methods when the police break into his apartment and find Lorre and Astor locked in a struggle; and notice a long shot toward the end of the film, when Lorre stands in the background, barely noticeable at the corner of the frame, withdrawing an unlit cigarette from his mouth, his great frog eyes staring with pity, his hand reaching down to pat Elisha Cook on the shoulder. Against this clever indirection, and somehow enhancing it, is the mannerism of the camera technique. Ultimately, the film is just stylized enough to represent the private-eye story as a male myth rather than a slice of life, and Huston's wit is just sly enough to humanize the action without destroying its power as melodrama.

The original promotion for John Huston's Maltese Falcon (1941) bears little relation to the actual film. In this poster, the studio capitalized on Humphrey Bogart's earlier appearances as a gangster in The Petrified Forest (1936) and High Sierra (1941), and on Hammett's reputation as the author of a popular "screwball" murder mystery, The Thin Man (1934).

(Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive.)

The success of the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon inspired Paramount to remake The Glass Key in 1942. This adaptation was scripted by pulp writer Jonathan Latimer, one of Hammett's imitators, and was designed as a vehicle for Alan Ladd, who had achieved great success that same year in Paramount's This Gun for Hire. It features low-key photographic effects by Theodore Sparkuhl, and it restores a good deal of the sexually perverse material that the first adaptation omitted. Ned Beaumont's seduction of the newspaper editor's wife (Margaret Hayes) is cruel and titillating, and even more remarkable are Beaumont's repeated beatings at the hands of Jeff (William Bendix), which are the most disturbingly violent scenes in any Hollywood picture of World War II.

Despite The Glass Key's occasional challenges to the Production Code, it concludes in sentimental fashion: Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy) recognizes that Beaumont and Janet Henry (Veronica Lake) are two kids who "have got it bad for each other," and he cheerfully gives his blessing to their impending marriage.

In writing the novels upon which The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon were based, Hammett was indirectly responsible for two of the most important film cycles of the classic studio era. He was in fact an unusually "movielike" author, who possessed an ear for American speech and a sense of the texture of modern lifeincluding the tunes people sang, the clothes and hairstyles they wore, the furnishings in their rooms, and the way they posed in magazine photographs. As John Huston recognized, Hammett's novels were already virtual scripts, containing little more than objective descriptions and exchanges of pungent dialogue. And yet Hammett had a contempt for Hollywood, and Huston was the only director who gave his work cinematic distinction. In the 1940s and for a long time afterward, an accurate rendition of this popular but in some ways radically skeptical novelist would have been politically controversial, morally challenging, and perhaps excessively artful in the eyes of the major studios.

Soon after Hammett modernized the American detective story, Graham Greene and his contemporaries (including Hitchcock and Eric Ambler) performed a similar transformation of British crime and spy fiction. The transformation is remarked upon in Greene's Ministry of Fear (1943), when the hero experiences a tormented dream in which he speaks to his mother about an older England: "People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it over and over in books of the month, but it's not there any more." Greene's dismissal of "lady novelists" is consistent with the fact that most of the women in his thrillers are either passive or benighted consumers of mass culture. Yet his air of toughness and less-deceived realism is disingenuous, because his own success derived from books of the month.

The Oxford-educated son of a middle-class family, Greene began his career as an undistinguished and rather old-fashioned poet and then attempted historical fiction and biography with mixed success. His first major opportunity came in the early 1930s, when his publisher, the Heinemann company, pressured him for a novel that could be sold to the movies and at the same time offered as a selection of the British Book Society. This last organization had been founded in 1928 by best-selling authors Arnold Bennett and Hugh Walpole, A. R. Frere-Reeves of Heinemann, and a number of writers who knew Greene personally; it had over ten thousand subscribers who were offered a monthly volume, and it could guarantee a large sale for any author. Greene responded with Stambol Train, a novel about international intrigue that was chosen as the Society's "Main Selection" and, in 1934, turned into a Hollywood movie entitled Orient Express, starring Heather Angel. (Variety described the production as "another of those Grand Hotel on wheels ideas" [6 March 1934], and Greene later wrote that the only things Hollywood preserved from his novel were the parts that were "cheap and banal enough to suit the cheap banal film" [quoted in Sherry, 1:590].)