The Maltese Falcon (1941 film)

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This article is about 1941 film. For other uses, see The Maltese Falcon (disambiguation).


Maltese Falcon (1941)
Directed by John Huston
Produced by Henry Blanke (associate producer)
Hal B. Wallis (executive producer)
Written by John Huston
based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett
Starring Humphrey Bogart
Mary Astor
Music by Adolph Deutsch
Cinematography Arthur Edeson
Editing by Thomas Richards
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release date(s) October 3, 1941
Running time 101 min.
Language English
IMDb profile

The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. It was written and directed by John Huston in his directorial debut and stars Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade, Mary Astor (in place of Geraldine Fitzgerald whose clashes with the studio cost her the role) as Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the femme fatale who hires him, Sydney Greenstreet in his film debut as Kasper Gutman, and Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo.

Contents

[edit] Production

John Huston actually used much of the dialogue from the original novel, removing all references to sex which the Hays Office had now deemed to be un-American. In 1936, Warner Brothers attempted to re-release the original 1931 version, but was denied approval by the Production Code Office due to the film's "lewd" content. This is probably the reason why a cleaned-up version of the film was produced in 1941. It wasn't until after 1966 that unedited copies of the original film could be legally shown in the United States.

The role of Sam Spade was, in fact, not offered first to Bogart, but rather to George Raft who turned it down because he thought this remake "was not an important picture." Bogart's role became the character archetype for a private detective in the Film Noir genre, providing him near-instant acclaim.

[edit] Response

The 1941 version has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

The quote, "The stuff that dreams are made of," (cf The Tempest, Act IV, Sc 1, line 155) was chosen as #14 on the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes, a list of top movie quotes.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Academy Award nominations

[edit] Trivia

  • Sydney Greenstreet's character in the movie was nicknamed "The Fat Man", and was the namesake of the "Fat Man" atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II.[1]
  • In 1988, the film was parodied in "The Big Goodbye," a first-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, is a fan of detective stories of the early 20th Century, including the fictional Dixon Hill, a stand-in for Sam Spade. The episode title is a play on The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, both titles of novels by Raymond Chandler featuring hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe. In a holodeck simulation, Picard-as-Hill is opposed by Cyrus Redblock, whose name is a play on "Sidney Greenstreet." Redblock was played by Lawrence Tierney, who had acted in several crime drama films in the 1940s. Redblock is looking for "the item," which is never identified, but is meant to stand in for the Falcon.
  • The movie was adapted into a one-hour episode of CBS' Academy Award Theater, with Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, and Mary Astor reprising their roles from the movie. [2]
  • Ronson touch tip lighters were used throughout the film, which were made in the 1930's and early 1940's in a variety of configurations and were popular.
  • 1911's were the choice of weapon of the "gunsel"
  • In the computer game Fallout there's a bar called "Maltese Falcon"
  • There is a homage to the film in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, a forgetable Raul Julia made-for-TV movie that gained fame in its appearance on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Robert Serber, Peace & War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998): 104.
  2. ^ Terrace, Vincent [1999]. Radio Programs, 1924-1984:A Catalog of Over 1800 Shows. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0351-9.

[edit] External links

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