The Stuff That [Movie] Dreams Are Made Of --

"In 1539, the Knights Templar of Malta, paid tribute to Charles V of Spain, by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels- - - - - but pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day."

Thus, no matter that it was myth, begins novice Director John Huston's adaptation of the most influential detective novel ever written: Samuel Dashiel Hammett's THE MALTESE FALCON. A movie which vies for the title of being the first Film Noir; one that established Sam Spade as Humphrey Bogart's film persona, and gave him dominant stardom. Also, villain of the story Sidney Greenstreet, at 61 and 285 pounds, in his first movie, became an instant favorite with moviegoers, pairing with fellow Falcon seeker Peter Lorre in eight other films. For Huston, it was the beginning of a 45 picture directing career, a legend which, dark shadings and all, is as bright today as ever.

And so, perhaps there really was a Falcon -- possibly several of them.

Huston's friend and sometimes collaborator, Orson Welles -- among the first Auteurs designated by the French -- veritably said that he started at the top (CITIZEN KANE, 1941) and worked his way down. John Huston could have observed, with an equally self-deprecating but more confident chuckle, that he started at the top (THE MALTESE FALCON, 1941) but climbed above the asphalt jungle of Hollywood to find the treasure of . . . the Sierra Madre. Though he never quite achieved the status of Auteur in the eyes of the critics, Huston might have continued that he was the man who would be king, before he left Fat City to reside on the other side of the wind with the dead, south of Puerto Vallarta, in Las Caletas, on the west coast of Mexico. It was quite a life. When he died, according to his last mistress, with hands raised above his head like a battered but still winning champ, his last words were: "Just give 'em Hell!"

Distantly related through the Gores of the Middle Border, Welles and Huston were entwined in their careers from quite early on. An opera diva nursing a ruined throat, Margaret Huston Carrington Jones, with whom Huston stayed for periods as a young man, became a voice coach in New York City. Among her pupils -- in addition to Lillian Gish, Alfred Lunt and John Barrymore -- were future members of the Mercury Theater Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Orson Welles -- and her brother (Walter) and nephew (John), respectively. Mrs. Huston Carrington Jones' basic technique was to teach her pupils to bring their natural speaking voices down by at least an octave. (Terrible advice for Opera singers, conceivably useful on the Stage, but marvelously career-making, at the time, in the new bass-challenged medium of Radio.) For Welles and Huston, it was the beginning of an association reinforced through Huston's jaunt from New York to Chicago to play a reincarnated Abraham Lincoln in a production of The Lonely Man. The 1937 play was by Howard Koch, soon to be Huston's friend and collaborator, who would also be a future Welles' radio writer ("The War of the Worlds") -- and later a screenwriter for Warner Brothers (CASABLANCA). Partly on the strength of his success in Koch's play, Huston then made his Broadway debut, directing an adaptation of an obscure novel/Welles' Mercury Theater radio property, Passenger to Bali, starring his father, Walter. The Huston-Welles friendship, personal and professional, continued until he starred in Welles' last, never quite completed film, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

[THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND continues to live, the stuff of movie imagination, a final fabulous stolen bird which some men and women still pursue.]

At his death, Huston could look back on a career as a boxer, a short story writer, a Mexican cavalryman, a painter, a studio screenwriter, a wanderer, a great lover, a stage actor, a gambler, a stage director, a movie writer-director, a gambler, a raconteur, a movie actor. He was also the famous son of superb stage, screen and radio star, Walter Huston, and a famous father of the actress Anjelica Huston.

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And it all began with Dashiell Hammett's THE MALTESE FALCON, in 1941.

*"On a typical night in San Francisco: wet, cold, foggy, I looked up at the bridging street, the entrance to Chinatown. Then, I crossed Stockton, climbed between the iron hatchways that opened above bare ugly stairs. I went up to the parapet, and, resting my hands on the damp coping, looked back down Stockton from whence I'd come."

Sam Spade, in Hammett's novel, is describing the scene of his partner Miles Archer's murder (which you can still see today, somewhat altered, from San Francisco's *Bush Street overpass).

Loyalty to his partner in a professional sense (while perhaps still sleeping with his wife) is central to the novel, the movie, and to Hammett's philosophy of life.

Perhaps a guiding principle in the less conventional side of Huston's career, too.

In 1941, Huston was emerging from a checkered past, which included two car accidents: one which had marred the face and career of Zita Johann (the immortal Princess Anckesen-Amon in THE MUMMY, 1931, and ex-wife of Welles' partner, John Houseman); and a second car accident (after which he had gone to England for a several years), when he struck and killed the young wife of a Brazilian romantic star, Roul Roulien. Huston's father, Walter, stayed loyally behind him, got him out of the country, arranged a financial settlement, and helped his son return to America and a writing job at Warner Brothers. There he worked on scripts for JEZABEL (Wyler, 1938), THE AMAZING DR. CLITTERHOUSE (Litvak, 1938), JUAREZ (Dieterle, 1939), WUTHERING HEIGHTS (Wyler, 1939), HIGH SIERRA (Walsh, 1940), and DR. ERLICH'S MAGIC BULLET (Dieterle, 1940); the latter which, won him an Academy Award Nomination. On the strength of that, Huston's agent Paul Kohner was able to insert a clause in his new contract which guaranteed him an opportunity to direct one of his own screenplays. When Producer Henry Blanke inquired what film he wanted to do, Huston shot back: The Maltese Falcon.

Warner Brothers owned the rights to the novel, had made it twice already, under other titles, with dubious success. The Studio was not crazy to encourage the writer/director contracts which Orson Welles and Preston Sturges had pioneered, and Blanke indicated that, for the present, his star writer should not waste much time on The Maltese Falcon. His screenplay for Howard Hawks' SERGEANT YORK (AAN for writing, 1941) needed polishing.

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As office partner Allen Rivkin recalled it, Huston asked an anonymous secretary to cut the text of the novel into scenes, designating shots and dialogue. A copy of this rough script was sent not only to Producer Blanke but to Studio Head Jack Warner, who to everyone's surprise, called it a great script. "Goddamnedest thing, kid," Rivkin remembered Huston saying. "Warner said he wants me to shoot it, and I start on Monday."

Huston would follow the first person viewpoint of the novel slavishly. [Only one shot, that of the pistol which kills Miles Archer -- done at the Studio's insistence -- is not seen with Sam Spade present.] The complex amorality of most of the characters would not be explained, but simply portrayed by the actors. Huston followed Producer Blanke's advice: "Shoot every scene as if it was the most important scene in the film." He depended upon the atmospheric Expressionistic expertise of veteran Cinematographer Arthur Edeson, who had already shot ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (Milestone,1930), FRANKENSTEIN (Whale, 1931), and THE INVISIBLE MAN (Whale, 1933); who would go on to CASABLANCA (Curtiz) the next year; then Negulesco's THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (1944), another story of double crossers, with similar characters and some of the same players.

The new director even made room for for a cameo with his father, Walter, as the dying Captain Jacobi.

And Huston storyboarded everything.

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The Maltese Falcon was to the new director "a dramatization of myself," and he was quite "congenial" with "Hammett's mentality and philosophy." In keeping with the reputations of Hammett and Huston, the novel is about a pack of ne'er-do-wells. Sam Spade (Bogart) is sleeping with the wife, Iva (Gladys George), of his partner, Archer (Jerome Cowan), who is an insatiable lecher, in his own right. The two police detectives in the film, Detective Lieutenant Dundy (Barton McLane) and Detective Sergeant Polhaus (Ward Bond) give off an air of disinterested corruption, like two men ignoring a dead body while waiting for a bus.

And those are the good guys!

The bad guys include Kasper Gutman (Greenstreet), whom the film suggests (and the novel clearly indicates) is a homosexual grifter with pedophiliac tendencies. His companion, his boy, his "gunsel," is Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook, Jr), a psychopathic thug; and Gutman's competitor, sometimes partner, is Joel Cairo (Lorre), who has a florid style, wears cloying cologne, and tends to be either in your face or whining at your feet.

By way of the one decent character in the film, Secretary Effie Perine (Dorothy Patrick), the film begins with the entrance into the office of Spade and Archer ("Private Investigations") of femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), who has a couple of aliases, it develops. In fact, in her implausible story of inquiry about a missing sister, being innocently involved in a murder and stalked by villains, very little she says, upon examination, adds up. [Of course, unlike Roman Polanki's CHINATOWN (1974), which pays homage to it, nothing else in THE MALTESE FALCON adds up either, which is the picture's point.] But her nicely crossed legs speak a truth, if not to Spade, definitely to Miles Archer.

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Mary Astor is thought by some too old, not sexy enough, for her role as the deadly lady of THE MALTESE FALCON, but we should remember that a majority of American middle class women, as late as the 1940's, tended to show signs of age at 30 which affluent women, with the aid of better diets, cosmetic care and botox, may not show at 60 today. Brigid is matronly, considered ladylake and beautiful in 1941. Besides, though she was 35 when she played Brigid in THE MALTESE FALCON -- in Movies since 1921 -- Mary Astor had recently gained a certain erotic panache, even for Hollywood. Participant in a number of affairs, including one with John Barrymore, widowed by a plane crash, eventually married several times more, victim to bouts of alchoholism, her failing career was unaccountably revived by a scandal. In a 1936 divorce action, just as she had fallen into a role opposite Walter Huston in Dodsworth, her husband, Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, attempting to gain custody of their daughter, tried to introduce into evidence her highly descriptive diary, which included an account of an affair with Playwright George S. Kaufman. Though repetitive details were leaked to the press, Producer Sam Goldwyn stood by her. The movie was successful, and the publicity and her professionalism led to THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (Cromwell, 1937), HURRICANE (Ford, 1937), MIDNIGHT (Leisen, 1939), BRIGHAM YOUNG (Hathaway,1940).

It did not hurt Astor's performance in THE MALTESE FALCON that she was having an affair with her young director, whose marriage to wife Leslie Black would be over in a year or so.

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Humphrey Bogart, well-off son of an Eastern physician and a magazine illustrator, the original Buster Brown Boy, a sensitive, quiet spoken intellectual, was in even more terrible marital problems; staying up, and out all night, drinking. His wife, Mayo Methot had recently stabbed him in the back, at the climax of a drunken brawl. Bogart was already a veteran portrayer of numerous thugs and stock villains since recreating his stage role of Duke Mantee in THE PETRIFIED FORREST (Mayo, 1936); but in John Huston, who wrote him his first sympathetic gangster role in HIGH SIERRA, Bogart found both the director of much of his best work and a friend for life.

Very unlike Hammett's Spade, described as a "blond Satan," Bogart's tough guy was a weary bloodhound of a man, with a cigarette and alcohol damaged voice. Different, too, was the raw humor, to be found nowhere in the novel, which Bogart injected into the character. For Sam Spade, as Otto Friedrich observes in City of Nets, his wonderful study of Hollwood in the 1940's, "he created the persona that not only made him famous for the rest of his life but gradually became his permanent identity."

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They all seem to have been a congenial crew, shooting the film swiftly -- for instance, concocting a seven minute scene between Bogart and Greenstreet, which required 22 consecutive moves followed by the camera, done with one take. In defiance of studio practice, Mary Astor remembered, they often all repaired to a nearby buffet dinner spot, where, using some of the time spared, they stayed sharing stories, good company and drinks, occasionally until Midnight.

And at the end of the happy shoot, as Huston revealed many years later, it was Bogart who, referring to the figure of the Maltese Falcon, contributed the most famous line in the movie, not from the novel but from Shakespeare, "It's the stuff dreams are made of."

John Huston was a director of many qualities and complications. In his works and in his life, he illustrated that, in the end, we are all probably losers, but even in our failure we may be triumphant.

In the year 1941, however, the Maltese Falcon, a magical fabled bird, was real for Huston; for his friends, Welles and Koch; for his new friend Humphrey Bogart; for Cinematographer Arthur Edeson; for Mary Astor, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year opposite Bette Davis in THE GREAT LIE; for Sidney Greenstreet, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and would act successfully in movies for another ten years; for Peter Lorre, whose career took up a renewed lease as result of THE MALTESE FALCON.

And for all of us who can still remember "the stuff dreams are made of."

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Note: This review was originally written, in part, for a Write-off which was going to trace in reviews the career of a favorite director, examining his/her first film, apex film, and last film. The Write/off, unfortunately, fell through, and I have been attempting to recast and re-balance the review ever since.

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For a Macresarf1 Review of other films and subjects mentioned above, click on the hyperlinks below:

CHINATOWN --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-172E-12DE7EC9-38F8EF67-prod3

CITIZEN KANE --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-4874-81FD18C-38741497-bd4

HIGH SIERRA --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-725F-14A7C2B8-3A316514-prod4

*A Tour of the Miles Archer Murder Scene --

http://www.epinions.com/trvl-review-27BD-11FFECC4-397783B4-prod2

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie_mu-1013214/display_~reviews

TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-789F-7C6E403-393ECCCB-prod3

THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS --

http://www.epinions.com/content_77175557764

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If you wish to explore all of Macresarf1's reviews, indexed by title and category, many with URL's, go to the following hyperlink --

http://www.epinions.com/content_2514526340










Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older