Luhr, "The Maltese Falcon, the Detective Genre, and Film Noir"

from: William Luhr (ed.), The Maltese Falcon. John Huston, director. Rutgers University Press, 1995. pp. 3 - 13.

The Maltese Falcon is an extraordinarily entertaining and well-crafted film. Immensely popular since its release more than half a century ago, it is still frequently shown in revival houses and on television, and is widely available in videotape and laserdisk forrnats. It may, however, be too popular for its own critical good: Scholars have paid little attention to it. [...]

The movie is remarkable not only for its long-term popularity but also for its significance in either inaugurating or changing crucial aspects of film history. These include the careers of individuals like John Huston and Humphrey Bogart; genres like the detective film; styles like film noir; and cultural trends such as redefinitions of American masculinity and femininity, the influence of psychoanalysis on popular culture, and isolationist America's perception of the international scene.

The Movie's Initial Reception

The Maltese Falconappeared in the fall of 1941 with little fanfare and few expectations. A modestly budgeted ($381,000) genre movie that was shot in less than six weeks (from June 9 to July 18, 1941), it had a first-time director and no major stars. The project offered so little promise that, before production began, at least two stars (George Raft and Geraldine Fitzgerald) had turned down the lead roles. It was based upon the popular Dashiell Hammett novel that had already been used as the basis for two films by the same studio (The Maltese Falcon, 1931, also known as Dangerous Female, and Satan Met a Lady, 1936), neither of which had been particularly successful. In fact, most of the reviewers seemed to be aware only of the 1931 film, and many, like Bosley Crowther of the New York Times (October 4, 1941), had not even seen that.

Unexpectedly, the film became a major success. Crowther remarks upon his pleasurable surprise in the first paragraph of his review: /4/

The Warners have been strangely bashful about their new mystery film, The Maltese Falcon, and about the young man, John Huston, whose first directorial job it is. Maybe they thought it best to bring both along under wraps, seeing as how the picture is a remake of an old Dashiell Hammett yarn done ten years ago, and Mr. Huston is a fledgling whose previous efforts have been devoted to writing scripts. And maybe—which is somehow more likely—they wanted to give everyone a nice surprise. For The Maltese Falcon. . . only turns out to be the best mystery thriller of the year, and young Mr. Huston gives promise of becoming one of the smartest directors in the field.

Many critics agreed with Crowther in characterizing the movie as a revelation. Leo Mishkin of the Telegraph(October 4, 1941) compared Huston with Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles and closed his review with, ''Suffice it to say that The Maltese Falconis the finest mystery picture to have come this way this year, suffice it to say that John Huston is a man to be reckoned with in naming the great directors of our time, suffice it to say that in the end, you'll have a tough time finding a better movie. What did they say about Kane? It's terrific! So is The Maltese Falcon."

Most of the credit went to the writer/director, John Huston, who, like Orson Welles that same year, emerged as a major talent with his first film. The praise came not only from critics in major cities upon the movie's initial release but also /5/ in December of 1941 when the film opened in a second tier of cities, like Baltimore and Dallas.[1] The positive reception continued internationally, most notably when the film first appeared in Paris in the summer of 1946 and was admiringly characterized as part of a major new style in American film dubbed film noir.

The enthusiastic French response to the film stressed somewhat different issues than the American response, such as the international literary prestige of Dashiell Hammett. In fact, Nino Frank opened his review of the film in L'Ecran Francais (August 7, 1946) in this way: "I will not insult my reader by telling him who Dashiell Hammett is: a private detective become writer." But even beyond Hammett's prestige, the movie was singled out with others that appeared in France after World War II for ushering in "a new type of detective story." This phrase was used as the title of a related article by Frank in the same journal (August 28, 1946) in which, referring to the traditional type of detective film, he simply says, "We are witnesses to the death of this formula" and "Thus these 'black' films have nothing in common with detective films of the usual type." Like American reviews, but with a different focus, the French reviews celebrate something new and important being born.

While the film was an immediate success, the people associated with it took some time to achieve the prominence in film history they now have. After The Maltese Falcon, Warner Bros. gave Huston a prestigious Bette Davis film, In This Our Life (1942), that turned out to be one of his least-known works. He did not enjoy another major Hollywood success until The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948. Comparably, Humphrey Bogart was making the transition from featured character roles to star roles; although he had a distinguishing success with High Sierra (1941), he did not become a major star until Casablancain 1943. However, The Maltese Falcon would forever be seen as the turning point in both Huston's and Bogart's careers: Before it, they were minor figures in Hollywood; after it, they became industry legends.

The movie's star-making potential was immediately recognized. This is evident in a bevy of jokes in gossip columns when the film appeared in late 1941. The LA. Heraldreported that since Bogart "clicked" in three roles turned down by George Raft (High Sierra, All Through the Night, and The Maltese Falcon), "he says he won't take another role unless Raft turns it down." Raft, in turn, when asked to comment on Bogart's success in the role, retorted, "There, but for the grace of me, go I" (New York Post, October 10, 1941). These jokes continued into the next year. Sidney Skolsky quoted Bogart in The Citizen News(March 16, 1942) as saying, "That Mark Twain is a great part. I hope they give it to George Raft, because I'd love to play it." Underlying the playful banter was the widespread assumption that The Maltese Falconhad done something of major significance for Bogart. /6/

Although this was the only time he played Sam Spade in films, he has become indelibly linked with the character, and "Sam Spade" has become a generic term for hard-boiled private detective, recognized even by those who have neither seen the movie nor read Hammett's novel.

Dashiell Hammett and Detective Fiction

The Maltese Falcondid more than transform individual careers; it helped change the detective genre and paved the way for film noir. Indeed, Huston's film represents a change in film detectives somewhat comparable with the influence of Dashiell Hammett's work on detectives in literature. The literary genre was itself a relatively new one when Hammett's work first appeared in the 1920s. The genre had its origins in the mid-nineteenth century in the works of Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, but did not hit its stride until the wildfire popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories at the end of the century. These, followed by the work of writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, set the tone for what has become known as the British school of detective fiction. These stories and novels generally involved a very bright detective, a very bright criminal, and an extremely clever crime in a comfortable, highly mannered, and largely benign society. When the crime is solved, that society returns to a peaceful "norrnality."

Hammett's work, which first appeared in the popular "pulp" magazine Black Maskin 1923, was characterized as part of the "hard-boiled" school of detective writing, which was a reaction against the more genteel British tradition. The detectives were proletarians rather than aristocrats (Sam Spade as opposed to Lord Peter Wimsey), and the crimes tended to be brutal and often senseless. The criminal acts and the moral decay they revealed were representative of rather than aberrations from the workings of the society in which they occurred. Social problems such as organized crime and urban corruption that were largely irrelevant to the British stories were central to the American ones. The language was not polite discourse but street slang and, even though the individual crime might be cleared up at the end, the social and personal evils it revealed tended to be endemic. This fiction offered little in the way of a return to a polite "normality," even when the mystery was solved. Hard-boiled writers like Hammett, James M Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson were less interested in the complex orchestration and clear-cut resolution of the crime than they were in the dark motivations of the criminals and their relationships to the society in which they functioned.

Hammett was not the first of the hard-boiled detective writers, but he quickly became one of the most admired and remains a standard by which others are judged. The Maltese Falcon, his third novel, appeared in serial form in 1929 and in book form in 1930. It was an immediate success and the film rights were /7/ quickly purchased for $8,500 by Warner Bros. Although Hammett's fiction won him an international reputation, he only completed two more novels. His work had helped create a genuine revolution in detective fiction, but by the time John Huston's film would help create a revolution in detective films, Hammett's star was beginning to set. In fact, although the film was shot using the title of Hammett's novel, the probable release title in the summer of 1941 was The Gent from Frisco; it was only returned to The Maltese Falcon on September 8, less then a month before general release. (The 1936 version had been called Satan Met a Lady.) This indicates that the studio did not presume the film's relation to Hammett's novel to be a major selling point. By 1941, all of Hammett's major creative work was behind him, and the remaining two decades of his life (he died on January 10,1961) were plagued with ill health and political and personal problems.

The Detective Film and Film Noir

Detective movies had existed at least since Sherlock Holmes Baffledin 1903 but did not become a significant genre until the sound era. This was partly due to the fact that many of the literary detectives that frequently appeared in films were not created until after 1925 (such as Hercule Poirot, Philo Vance, Charlie Chan, Ellery Queen, the "Saint," Philip Marlowe, Nick and Nora Charles, and Sam Spade). Furthermore, the major role that elaborate verbal reasoning plays in the form was difficult to present in silent cinema.

When sound came to dominate Hollywood around 1930, however, detective films flourished, but they employed thematic norms quite different from the "hard-boiled" fiction popular at the time, even when they used that fiction as their source. Most 1930s detective movies tended to leaven the gruesome aspects of their mystery with light comedy and many appeared in series formats that focussed largely upon the charm of the detective. Examples include the "Thin Man" series (based upon the Dashiell Hammett novel), and the Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, Bulldog Drummond, Ellery Queen, Mike Shayne, and Saint series.

This pattern is evident in the first two versions of The Maltese Falcon. In each, the detective (called Sam Spade in the 1931 and 1941 films, as well as in Hammett's novel, and Ted Shane in the 1936 film) is a happy-go-lucky, wise-cracking, two-fisted ladies' man. The films give as much attention to comedy and seduction as to the mystery and, in many ways, the mystery is really an excuse for the comedy and seduction.

Huston's film is altogether different in tone and points to a major trend for detective films to follow. Except for dark and cynical wisecracks, there is little comedy and hardly any seduction. Spade does not happily juggle a plethora of women but is bitterly involved with only two—his partner's wife, whom he has grown to loathe, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, whom he knows to be duplicitous and deadly. For him, sexuality is not carefree but dangerous and guilt-ridden. The /8/ mystery and the evil world it reveals dominate the mood of the movie, and this sinister atmosphere does not entirely disappear at the end.

Such an atmosphere presages film noir. The term means "black film" and indicates a darker view of life than previously common and a concentration upon human depravity, failure, and despair. The term also implies a cinematic style—a way of lighting, of positioning and moving the camera, the use of an introspective voice-over narration, often heavily reliant on flashbacks—and a choice of setting, generally a seedy, urban landscape, a world gone wrong. Film noir has stylistic antecedents in German expressionist films of the 1920s, as well as in American horror films and radio dramas of the 1930s, and thematic antecedents in the hard-boiled fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. The style did not fully develop until a few years later with films such as Double Indemnity(1944) and Murder, My Sweet(1944). However, substantial foundations were laid in 1941 with films such as The Maltese Falconwith its themes of widespread evil and deviant as well as manipulative sexuality, and Citizen Kanewith its dark, expressionist look and fragmented narration. Even earlier, in 1940, Stranger on the Third Floor, with its sinister look, nightmare sequence, and atmosphere of perverse and unstable masculinity, provided a precedent. As has often been noted, The Maltese Falcondoes not have the murky, chiaroscuro look of film noir but rather a well-lit "studio" look fairly typical for its time. It also does not stress the confusions, ambivalence, sexual degradation, and weakness of its central male character, and does not use a fragmented and/or voice-over narration. It does, however, share a number of themes important to the style, such as the "black widow," sexual deviance, and dark, tormented obsessions, many of which were drawn specifically from Hammett's novel and hard-boiled fiction in general.

John Huston admired Hammett's work and considered the novel ideal for his first directorial project. He was well aware that The Maltese Falconhad been adapted for film twice before but, contrary to common industry logic, did not consider this a disadvantage.

Only successful pictures are made over again; I've never understood why. I've never known of an instance where the remake was as good as the original. There is no formula that enables one to re-create the unique chemistry that went into making a particular picture a success. It should be the other way around. Unsuccessful pictures—those based on good material—which for reasons of time, place or circumstance just don't come off the first time around, are the ones that should be given a second chance. [2]

Huston realized that the earlier film versions of Hammett's novel had not substantially explored the darker components of the novel, partly due to norms for detective films of the 1930s, but also because of censorship. He chose to develop /9/ those darker implications in his film and had little trouble with the censors. "Despite the fact that I have a poor opinion of censorship in any form, I must admit that no picture of mine was ever really damaged by the censors. There was usually a way around them."[3]

The "way around them" would ultimately give much of film noir its unsettling and evocative flavor. Sexual activity, such as Spade's affair with O'Shaughnessy, or hers with Thursby, or sexual deviance, such as Cairo's probable homosexuality, is hinted at in a number of ways but never overtly shown or stated. The excess of the hints combined with the avoidance of explicit declaration gives the style its overdetermined and unsettling atmosphere; the viewer often feels poised at the borders of the forbidden without verification.

The borders of the forbidden, of what was allowed to be shown, were also shifting in the 1940s. As film noir developed as a style, it incorporated many things earlier censored, or untouched due to fear of censorship. Hollywood's approach to much of hard-boiled fiction provides an example. Some novels with dark implications, such as The Maltese Falcon, had earlier been made into light-hearted films; others remained untouched until the cultural climate changed. James M. Cain's scandalous The Postman Always Rings Twice was purchased by Hollywood soon after its publication in 1934 but was not filmed there until 1946. A French version and an unauthorized Italian version (Ossessione by Luchino Visconti) were made, but the material was considered too depraved for American audiences in the 1930s and early 1940s. With the development of film noir, however, such material suddenly became not only acceptable but also part of a popular new style sought out by the major studios. By 1947, only a year after the M-G-M The Postman Always Rings Twice starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, film noir had become so widely known that much of its style and themes were parodied by Bob Hope in My Favorite Brunette.

Film Noir, Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Xenophobia

One of the most culturally resonant characteristics of film noir is its critique of masculinity and femininity. It tends to drastically upset the traditional power balance between the sexes and construct women as powerful and men as weak and threatened. An important character type of the style is the "black widow," a woman who seduces, exploits, and then destroys her sexual partners. These characters, like Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) in The Maltese Falcon, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity, Helen Grayle (Claire Trevor) in Murder, My Sweet, or Kathie (Jane Greer) in Out of the Past, were evil and homicidal, but they were also smart and ambitious. They were not adjuncts of their men but competitors who often succeeded at least to a point. /10/ They tended to be destroyed in the end, but their very independence and skill at power politics has been seen by some feminist scholars as a positive step in developing representations of women. The flip side of this new empowerment of female characters was the emasculation of many of the male ones, an aspect of the genre that plays itself out repeatedly.

Out of the Past(1947) provides an ideal example. In it, Robert Mitchum plays Jeff, a private detective hired by a gangster, Whit (Kirk Douglas), to find his girlfriend, Kathie (Jane Greer), who has shot him and stolen his money. Although Jeff finds her, she seduces him and they run off together. When Jeff's partner tracks them down, she kills the partner and returns to Whit. Later, they conspire to frame Jeff for murder. In the end, she kills Whit and, when Jeff tries to turn her in to the police, she kills him by shooting him in the groin, making his emasculation literal.

Kathie repeatedly exploits and betrays the men. Although they seem intelligent and resourceful, they are repeatedly degraded by her, and they come back for more. She shoots and robs Whit, yet he wants her back; she gets Jeff to betray his employer, his partner, and his hopes for a new life, yet he also constantly returns to her. Both men are killed by her after repeatedly demonstrating their inability, while fully aware of her treachery, to resist her spell. In The Maltese Falcon, Brigid O'Shaughnessy plays a comparable role. Near the end, when Spade hands her over to the police after telling her that he is not going to walk in the shoes of the dead men who preceded him in her life, he, unlike many men in film noir, reveals his awareness of her manipulations of men and his ability to resist her. While Brigid's type of character quickly became a stereotype, it was so new to films when it appeared that some critics hardly knew what to do with it. Otis Ferguson's review in The New Republic(October 2O, 1941) provides an example:

The story is one of the few cases where they have their cake and eat it too, for the detective is in love with the mystery woman, and she might turn out in the end to be another case of (a) innocence wronged, (b) the most trusted agent of the United States Government. But she doesn't, and he sends her up for twenty years. There is bound to be a little confusion in this, for an audience likes to know where it stands, and neither Mary Astor's lines nor her abilities above them quite get over the difficulty of seeming black and then seeming white, and being both all along.

The character did not conform to traditional patterns and this new type of woman was, to some extent, unsettling.

The recurring invocation of the importance of past events, of doomed obsessions, of tormented and degrading sexual compulsions, of sexual deviation, of dreams and hallucinatory states, all point to the influence of psychoanalysis in forming the motives of the characters in film noir. Since the second decade of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis had influenced more elitist art works (such as /11/ German expressionist drama and film as well as such plays of Eugene O'Neill as Mourning Becomes Electraand Strange Interlude) but by the 1940s its assumptions and discourse were appearing in popular films, particularly, but not exclusively, films noir This goes beyond the overt inclusion of therapists as characters in the films, whether the quack psychic Jules Amthor and the evil Dr. Sonderborg of Murder, My Sweetor the sympathetic analysts in Now, Voyager(1942) and Lady in the Dark(1944); it can be seen in new elements of character motivation as well as imagery.

An example of this can be seen in some films starring James Cagney, who was famous for playing sociopathic gangsters. In the 1930s, films such as The Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties, and Angels with Dirty Facestended to associate the roots of his characters' criminal behavior with social problems such as urban poverty, Prohibition, and the Depression. In the late 1940s, however, he played a psychopathic gangster with an Oedipal complex in White Heat. The roots of this character's criminality had little to do with social problems but rather with a profound psychosis that manifested itself in debilitating headaches and an obsessive and unhealthy relationship with his criminal mother. At one point, this middle-aged man sits on her lap to have his headaches soothed; when he learns of her death he erupts into a psychotic explosion of violence and winds up in a straitjacket. Such overt employment of psychoanalytic notions in character construction had become fairly common by the late 1940s but had seldom appeared in popular genres in the 1930s.

The Maltese Falconjoins with many films of its era from different genres in demonstrating a distrust of things foreign. Non-U.S. characters, places, and things tend to be exotic at best, and often perverse, sexually overcharged, and dangerous. The Falcon itself is foreign—Maltese. Gutman, Cairo, and O'Shaughnessy have tracked it in their evil and murderous travels through foreign lands before winding up in San Francisco and encountering Spade. The very overlay of foreign cities and countries, given the cultural climate of the 1940s, compounds the evil of their murderous deeds.

Spade himself is no saint. He is having an affair with his partner's wife and has a reputation for balancing on the borders of the law, and perhaps crossing over to the outlaw's domain. He is clearly comfortable with criminals and maneuvers well among them in ways they respect. At the same time, he is not gleefully sociopathic as Gutman, Cairo, and O'Shaughnessy appear. He is developed as having his own moral calculus that separates him from them even while he is involved with them. Huston repeatedly photographs him in ways that suggest a dark, inner turbulence over the implications of the activities in which he is involved, and he behaves morally, with clearly stated reasons, at the conclusion while the others prepare to continue their life of crime. The film establishes Spade's Americanism, while flawed, as the desirable norm, sharing widespread isolationist American prejudices on the eve of World War II.

That same year, Huston worked on the screenplay of the Academy Awardwinning Sergeant York. That film, about the most decorated soldier of World /12/War I, also reveals a strong pro-U.S. bias. As Huston's career progressed, he would move away from these assumptions, shooting more and more of his films in foreign countries, using foreign themes, and even renouncing his U.S. citizenship to reside in Ireland and Mexico. The Maltese Falconserves as a kind of baseline against which to measure Huston's later critique of American xenophobia; it also reflects widespread American cultural presumptions less than a month before its entry into World War II: In it, things from foreign lands are associated with evil, perversity, and death.

The Film's Critical Reputation

On December 6, 1994, one of the Maltese Falcon statuettes used in the film was auctioned off at Christie's East for $398,500, an astounding sum, particularly since it had been expected to raise only $30,000 to $50,000 by the auction house. The feverish bidding, and the publicity the sale garnered, testifies to the ongoing popularity of the film. Why, then, has it not received comparable scholarly attention?

Any reasons must be speculative. It is hard to say why people do not do something, but a number of explanations are likely that incorporate both the film's initial and enduring popularity as well as historical shifts in the critical discourse surrounding it.

Other films of its era, such as Double Indemnityand The Big Sleep(1946), have not been neglected but have accreted a substantial body of critical literature around them. Is The Maltese Falconan inferior film, or are other explanations likely?

One possible explanation lies in the vagaries of Huston's critical reputation. When the auteur theory was developing in France in the 1950s and in the U.S. in the 1960s, Huston often served as a whipping boy. He was considered a director, unlike Alfred Hitchcock or Welles, without a discernible visual style or obvious thematic continuities. The sorts of rich, career-wide extrapolations that were easily made when analyzing films by Charlie Chaplin or John Ford did not seem as readily available with Huston's work, and very possibly influenced choices in film analysis, causing The Maltese Falconto be overlooked.

Furthermore, by the late 1950s and through the 1960s, Huston's career was widely seen as having peaked and in severe decline. This sort of perception may have had a ripple effect upon critics' willingness to explore earlier works that had i initially been praised.

The decline in Huston's reputation also occurred when serious critical enthusiasm for film noir was building, beginning perhaps in 1955 with Raymonde Borde and Etienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir americain(1941-1953).[4] Huston did not make many films associated with the style and The Maltese Falcon/13/ holds a transitional place in the style's development, so the building enthusiasm for film noir did not help his, or The Maltese Falcon's reputation substantially.

Both the auteur theory and the development of interest in film noir are part of the historical urge for the young discipline of serious film discourse to justify itself. Eager to differentiate their work from the gushings of fan magazines and ephemeral journalism, film theorists used the auteur theory, with its presumption of authorial vision and stylistic continuity over an oeuvre, implicitly to equate their discourse with those of serious scholars of literature, music, and painting. Such a self-validating imperative may also be associated with the growing critical enthusiasm for film noir. Not authorial at all, work on the style traces stylistic and thematic continuities over diverse works by different authors. Both the auteur theory and the study of film noir made claims for the exploration of film as a serious and not merely a popular pursuit.

Within this context, the Bogart cult in France and the U.S. in the late 1950s and 1960s, which categorized The Maltese Falconas preeminently a "Bogart" movie, may have reflected the film's popularity but worked against its critical reputation. The cult fell into an area, star and personality fandom, from which serious film discourse was endeavoring to distance itself. Only recently has film scholarship taken on the area of stars.

Presuming these speculations to have some validity in explaining the critical neglect of The Maltese Falcon, the climate may very possibly be changing. Not only did John Huston's career undergo a major upswing in the late 1970s but Andrew Sarris, the major U.S. champion of auteurism, wrote a famous and positive reappraisal of his work. Interest in film noir remains strong and The Maltese Falcon's place in it is a critical "given" too longstanding not to provoke further exploration. Furthermore, the recent serious work on star careers has so established itself as substantial that appraisals of films often considered star vehicles has proven not only respectable but capable of producing profound new insights.

Notes

[1] Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 134.

[2] John Huston, An Open Book(New York: Knopf, 1980), 218-282

[3] Ibid., 83

[4] Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1955.