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The Three Sam Spades: The Shifting Model of American Masculinity in the Three Films of The Maltese Falcon.

In this article, Gates compares the three film versions of Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon. The main focus is more on the first two film adaptations (Dangerous Female and Satan Met a Lady) than Huston’s. At first, the article discusses how faithful each film was to the original novel in its writing. The article then moves on to focus more on the portrayal of the hero and how it changed over the course of the three films, shifting from the soft-boiled detective of the Depression to the hard-boiled one of pre-WW2. It also, at more length, discusses how the first film depicted the hero as much more of a sex symbol than the later films, especially the original adaptation. Next, the article discusses the films four villains, and how they’re perceived “sexual perversion” in all versions of the film, but especially in the last two. Also included is that the perception and representation of each character changed after the first adaptation. The final two portions of the article lament the absence of the depressing circularity of Hammett’s novel.

The main idea that we can take from this article is the shift of the hero figure in this period leading up to the Second World War and the dawning of film noirs in Hollywood. Being able to analyze three movies with similar, if not exactly the same, storylines allows us to see how things changed in that 10 year period between 1931 and 1941. Gates tells us that while the original depiction of Sam Spade was as a sexy, ladies’ man, the depiction of the Spade in the 1941 version was the one that would become the most popular by far. Many film noirs were detective stories, featuring a so called hard-boiled hero who was a tough guy, a definition of masculinity, who no longer had the optimism of the Depression-era detectives, instead having a bleak, realist worldview.

Gates, Philippa. "The Three Sam Spades: The Shifting Model of American Masculinity in the Three Films of The Maltese Falcon." Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.1 (2008): 7-26. Project Muse. 24 Nov 2008 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/framework_the_journal_of_cinema_and_media/v049/49.1.gates.html#back

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture: Humphrey Bogart

The article details the life of Humphrey Bogart, the actor who portrayed the hero Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. He was born into an upper middle class family and spent time in the Navy before acting. He moved from the stage into minor Hollywood villain roles, a tough guy. His big breaks came in 1941 with Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon for Warner Brothers. Two years later, he met Lauren Bacall, who would become his third and most stable wife. Despite their strong personalities, the two meshed well and became a good couple. Bogart tried to contain his volatile personality in his later films, with some success, starring in such movies as the drama In a Lonely Place and the comedy Sabrina. He died of emphysema in 1957.

The important thing to grasp from this is to notice the rise of Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood star at the same time as the rise of the film noir genre. While it would be a little extreme to suggest that Humphrey Bogart singlehandedly was responsible for popularizing the tough, hard boiled hero, it would be hard not to say he had some part in it. Firstly, the wild success of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, and to a lesser degree High Sierra, propelled Bogart into stardom and the public’s eye. The fact that he did this without compromising the tough guy image he’d fostered no doubt influenced the public’s craving for similar type characters. Also, one should note that while Casablanca may the more revered, The Maltese Falcon may be the more influential, for the type of character Bogart played in The Maltese Falcon was the one who changed an entire genre and style. Bogart didn’t invent the tough guy hero. He simply made it mainstream, and, in essence, made, what would become the film noirs, economically feasible.

Christina Lane " Humphrey Bogart". St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture. . FindArticles.com. 01 Dec. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g1epc/is_bio/ai_2419200117

So Many Fragments, So Many Beginnings, So Many Pleasures, The Neglected Detail(s) in Film Theory

This article by Rashna Wadia provides an antistructuralist criticism and analysis of The Maltese Falcon. She proceeds to use each letter of the alphabet to stand for a word or phrase and use it to provide analysis of the film. In her analysis, she not only discusses the aspects of the film itself, but the themes of its objects, nuances of its production, and even some topics that border upon minutia. As with any antistructuralist essay, the paper has no real ending.

The article itself does not discuss the film in the context of being a film noir, but in and of itself. One of the items that it discusses falls under the heading of “D: ‘Dependable’”. This is the role of the secretary with the heart of gold in a private eye movie. We see this in Kiss Me Deadly, a later noir film, and in others of the genre. While this was a fairly established concept, having it in this film helped to crystallize the idea. In addition, we also get the concept of sexual restraint in direct contradiction to the amount of sexual tension within the movie. While this is a result of the new restrictions of the day on films, it results in a hero who has a romantic relationship, but also the moral values not to indulge in any kind of elicit sexual activity with that person. This would be another common theme in the flawed heroes of the later film noirs, an underlying moral code that provides them with a sense of sexual restraint during the movie.

Wadia, Rashna. "So Many Fragments, So Many Beginnings,So Many Pleasures: The Neglected Detail(s) in Film Theory." Criticism 45.2 (2003`): 173-95. Project Muse. 24 Nov 2008.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/criticism/v045/45.2wadia.html

Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body

Michael Davidson’s article discusses how various disabilities are used to create a stereotype of the people who have them in film, what he calls the “phantom limb phenomenon”. In film noir, this is especially prevalent, extending beyond physical disabilities to include both mental disabilities, even homosexuality in some cases. The author then considers the feminist point of view, in the form of Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Rear Window and Vertigo, where men with disabilities have obsessive compulsions involving women, a sort of way to enhance their masculinity. The author believes both Mulvey and her critics to accept castration as too easy an explanation for the compulsions. He goes on to write extensively about Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, both in reference to the relationship between Neff, the male lead and committer of insurance fraud, and Keyes, a man against insurance fraud, and in the parallels between Neff and Mr. Dietrichson. The author then discusses similar themes of disability in Welles’s Lady from Shanghai. He concludes with some final thoughts on the relationship between sexuality and physical disability.

The main idea that we get from this article relates to the theme of subconscious sexual themes in the film noirs. While definitely more obvious and prevalent in later movies like Double Indemnity, as Davidson mentioned, we can find these themes in The Maltese Falcon, as well. The most obvious one would be the effeminate and most likely homosexual character of Joel Cairo, played by Peter Lorre. In all ways, the character is the least imposing of any of the five main characters. He has not the wily charms of Brigid, the power of Gutman, or the violence of Wilmer. Even the gun he pulls on Spade in his office is almost laughably tiny. The man seems fragile, as if he would break at any moment, his effeminacy a most definite weakness. Also, returning to the guns, the phallic symbolism of the weapon throughout the film is obvious. As mentioned before, Cairo’s is tiny, reflecting his lack of masculinity. Also, the ease with which Spade disarms Wilmer emasculates the man, taking his gun away from him. The fact that Spade is the only one who is able to hold onto his establishes him as the dominant male.

Davidson, Michael. "Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.1-2 (2003): 57-77. Project Muse. 24 Nov 2008.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v009/9.1davidson.html

American Film Noir: The History of an Idea

James Naremore’s article attempts to trace out the history of the idea of American film noir. He determines its origins not to be in a genre or a visual style, but in Paris, France, where a series of five films, including Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, were shown together in 1946. Because the French coined the term, they also determined what constituted a film noir. In addition, there ability to have an outside opinion on Hollywood films aided them in defining it. He focuses on the French newspapers, as they were more willing to coin the new term than the American, sharing the theme of brutal violence and darkened view on society. Moving forward, the new French writers threw their own existential ideas on top of the film noirs as they began to die out. In the end, the film noirs lead to a new movement in French cinema, at the same time ending the first age.

Within this article, we get a much more factually based analysis of the origins of Film Noir, going back to the foundations of the word in France. There is a mention of the origins of the style of the five films screened in Paris in 1946 being traced back to the French urban crime melodramas. Though it is obviously not French, The Maltese Falcon was an urban crime melodrama, and, of the screened films that inspired the term, was the earliest, chronologically. The theme of brutal violence also occurs often in The Maltese Falcon, from the shooting of Archer, a scene that is in no ways elegant, and the constant hand to hand combat between Spade and others, where he simply overpowers others, is rife with this. We would see this echoed in later noirs like Night of the Hunter, with its strong focus on the power of a man over a woman and her children, his strength simply increasing his menace.

Naremore, James. "American Film Noir: The History of an Idea." Film Quarterly 49.2 (1995-96): 12-28. JSOTR. 29 Nov 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1213310.pdf

This article discusses film noir and its origins. It begins by establishing the mood of disillusionment evoked by the film noir movies and the origins of this in both the literature and prose of the time, but the times themselves. It is also established that film noir is a very loose term in that it has not yet been determined to define a genre, a time period, or a visual style, though the all share common elements. The article then discusses two books which criticize film noir: Paula Rabinowitz’s Black and White and Noir: America Pulp Modernism and Nicole Rafter’s Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. The books both take similar but varying looks at film noir, and the article criticizes them as not having a broad enough view of film noir to complete a strong analysis. The article concludes with speculation of film noir’s origins in the American Gothic tradition, and how that somewhat anarchist worldview can be seen to be represented in film noir.

What we get here is an analysis of the concept of film noir in general. Scruggs covers a lot of material in his article of film noir. What we are able to draw from this are two things: film noirs have both a definitive style and often fitting nicely into the formula of a crime film. We can infer that this template of the crime film became popular at least partially because of the success The Maltese Falcon had with this style. Also, the idea of the flawed hero is central to many noir films, a concept we can fully identify in our hero of The Maltese Falcon, Mr. Sam Spade. While he’s not evil like Gutman or Joel Cairo, there are certain unsavory aspects about Sam Spade, such as the affair he is having with Archer’s wife. As Scruggs suggests, to overlooks the darkness in film noir characters is to miss a great deal of their meaning.

Scruggs, Charles. ""The Power of Blackness": Film Noir and Its Critics." American Literary History 16.4 (2004): 675-87. Project Muse. 24 Nov 2008.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v016/16.4scruggs.html

In a lonely street : film noir, genre, masculinity / Frank Krutnik.

Krutnik, Frank, 1956- . In a lonely street : film noir, genre, masculinity / Frank Krutnik. 0415026296 series London ; New York, NY : Routledge, 1991.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.F54 K78 1991

Chapter seven of this book analyzes the phallic imagery and masculine symbolism in four different movies of the film noir genre. The analysis of the first movie, The Maltese Falcon, is short and focuses on the definite masculinity of Sam Spade, setting it as a control to compare the other three to. He then takes time to mention the threat of women to masculinity. The second film, The Dark Corner, features a protagonist, in Bradford Galt, who is much less self-assured than Sam Spade, to the point where he is submissive to others and dependant on his female secretary. The next film, Out of the Past, shows a man, Jeff Markham/Bailey, who seems to personify the idea of the hard boiled protagonist, but unlike Spade, he falls to the charms of a woman when she’s around. Finally, we reach the film The Killers, where Swede, the tough boxer, is so completely under the spell of a woman that he kills himself eventually.

As expected, we find out more about the tough protagonists of the majority of noir films. In this instance, we see how the later films play off of the established model of Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon to create more complex characters. This is not to say that the tough Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon is not a fully realized character, for he most definitely is, just different from the other protagonists. Sam Spade is a man in full possession of his faculties, with a seeming disconnect from humanity in general, almost contempt for it. This is the largest change, as the others seem to follow the formula of the hero of Double Indemnity, where a tough man can fight the world, but not the charms of a beautiful woman. So while the characters of Markham and Swede share Spade’s masculinity in respect to be physically imposing, they fall short of his mental toughness.

Film noir : reflections in a dark mirror / Bruce Crowther.

Crowther, Bruce, 1933- . Film noir : reflections in a dark mirror / Bruce Crowther. 0826405045 : series New York : Continuum, 1989, c1988.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.F54 C76 1989

In chapter 2 of his book, Crowther further details the history of film noir in the works of, what he calls, “Tough Guy Writers”, many of whom wrote crime stories for pulp magazines after having careers in newspaper. Many of these stories would eventually become film noirs. The first author discussed is Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich, who explored the human psyche with his disturbed male characters. W. R. Burnett was another, though his stories tended more towards the realm of gangster stories than the crime film noirs, and movies based on them reflected that. Horace McCoy also provided criminal stories, some becoming even darker than the majority of pulp crime novels. James M. Cain’s sharp and short writing style, especially the quick dialogue, suited itself well to film noir. The works of Dashiell Hammett were more complex in their prose than the other of the tough guy writers, even to the point of philosophizing. The final of the major writers, Raymond Chandler, defined his stories by a distinct knowledge and use of location to set his novels.

We see in this chapter of the book how the film noirs grew out of the popular genre of cult novels, whose action and snappy dialogue lent themselves to being adapted to film. Of these adaptations, Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon was not the first, not even of the novel itself. However, the mood and dialogue of the film and its use of a hard boiled protagonist were very uncommon, especially in mainstream cinema. The film most definitely has the corruption of the human psyche that the author states is a characteristic of Woolrich’s novels that lent itself to the film noir genre. One thing the author is quick to point out about The Maltese Falcon is that while the protagonist loves the leading lady, the femme fatale, he allows her to be taken away. The ending in itself is typical of the downer endings of film noirs, but the fact that the protagonist does not fight for his love is atypical of the later film noirs, like Kiss Me Deadly and Double Indemnity, where the protagonist follows the femme fatale to his near death.

Fatal woman : sources of male anxiety in American film noir, 1941-1991 / James F. Maxfield.

Maxfield, James F., 1936- . Fatal woman : sources of male anxiety in American film noir, 1941-1991 / James F. Maxfield. 0838636624 (alk. paper) series Madison : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; London : Associated University Presses, c1996.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.F44 M38 1996

James Maxfield begins his book on the femme fatale with a chapter on the characters of Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaunessy from The Maltese Falcon, comparing them with the Tarnished Knight and La Belle Dame Sans Merci (literally: The Beautiful Woman without Thanks) of medieval lore. Early on in both the novel and film we learn that Sam Spade is a hard man, almost neurotically domineering with no softness, indifferent even to the death of his partner. However, he and Brigid share the similarity that they both like to control the situation and keep others on edge. When Spade yells at her at the end, the author believes it is most likely he’s forcing himself to push her away because he knows exactly how she will come to control him like all the other men. Brigid O’Shaunessy is a typical “femme noir”, as the author terms it. In the end, we see that while Spade turns her over and resists her charms, the “stuff” his “dreams are made of” involve Brigid, and a part of him wishes to have her back.

This important chapter establishes and then elaborates upon a very important concept that is one of the central tenants of film noir: the femme fatale. While there were certainly dangerous women before this, they were incredibly few and far between and nothing like this. Brigid in The Maltese Falcon is the first in a long line of women who are as dangerous as any of the male villain characters, if not more so because she has our hero lulled into a false sense of security because he trusts her. The real success here is the establishment of the seductress playing the damsel in distress and then turning around and showing her true face as being a villain, an evil and incredibly subversive character who has it out for our hero. The femme fatale is all the more dangerous, because no one, not even other villains, can trust her. She works on her own and is only out for herself. The idea of the femme fatale extends beyond film noir into every single genre these days, having become a universal construct. Its origins, however, are most definitely grounded in the foundations of the detective film noirs.

America's favorite movies : behind the scenes / Rudy Behlmer.

Behlmer, Rudy. . America's favorite movies : behind the scenes / Rudy Behlmer. 080442036X series New York : F. Ungar Pub. Co., c1982.
Call#: Van Pelt Library--4 East--Temporary Location Annenberg PN1993.5.U6 B36 1982

Chapter 8 of the book details the production of The Maltese Falcon. John Huston, a first time director, convinced producer Henry Blanke to film the novel a third time, with a closer focus on the novel. The script passed the censors with a few minor alterations to reduce sexual content and Bogart, the second choice, was cast as the lead after a series of role swaps and power plays on the part of Bogart and other actors. Mary Astor, also the second choice, received the female lead, while Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet were also cast, first choices both of them. In a change from the subdued 1931 version and the light hearted 1936 version, the Huston film took a much more serious and realistic view of the characters. Contrary to most Warner films, The Maltese Falcon was shot at a much slower pace, and the result was approved by the producers. Relatively few reshoots were needed and the film debuted far above expectations. Bogart’s star took off from here, and while Warner wanted to film another, similar film with the same leads, the project fell through.

This short description of the production of The Maltese Falcon gives us a little insight into what could’ve been and how close certain key elements nearly did not fall into place. Of them, the two biggest would be the near casting of George Raft in the lead role of Sam Spade. Almost without a doubt, this would have changed the entire portrayal of the Sam Spade character, as Bogart’s interpretation of the character was unique in the other three versions of the story, including the original novel. Also, the changes forced upon the script by the Production Code Association resulted in the sexual tension between the characters being mostly off-screen and subdued. This idea of just below the surface sexual tension would become a major theme in almost all of the film noirs, and even though it’s not as big of a theme in The Maltese Falcon, there are major unexplored sexual plotlines.

Bibliography - Maltese Falcon and Film Noir

Most people consider John Huston