Lee in Limbo’s Matinée Idyll: The Maltese Falcon
crossposted from Lee Edward McIlmoyle's blog
SERIES INTRODUCTION
A year or two ago, my good friend Rodney Brazeau asked me to start writing classic movie reviews for him. I did a handful [1] [2] [3] for him and enjoyed the act of reviewing these classic films, but unfortunately, I found the act of writing the reviews for TheMovieSnitch.com to be a bit of a let down. They have an accepted and time-worn format over there, and it’s not really my style. Too brief, too direct. No room to really discuss the films at length.
That may work for most modern films, which are pretty direct and generally don’t have a lot of complicated plot points to avoid spoiling, or a lot of intense characterization to analyse (FYI: I’m not saying ALL modern movies are like this. However, there is a serious lack of ‘meaningful’ plot development in most of your summer blockbusters, which is what most movie sites are talking about these days, since so many of the films being advertised widely are summer blockbusters. I’m sorry, but yet another action sequence does not a real plot make).
The thing about classic movies from the early 20th Century up to perhaps the very early 80s is, the art of writing screenplays hadn’t been codified into the formulaic process it has become, where everything is counted in beats and the beats go by at roughly the speed of a bullet train. Again, don’t get me wrong. I love me some breakneck speed plotting, and the occasional action/sci-fi/fantasy/adventure film comes along that throws so many wrenches into the works that I have to see a chiropractor when it’s over. Films like ‘Inception’, ‘The Fountain’ (shut up, I liked that film), and ‘The Usual Suspects’ before it raise the bar for modern plot twisters that invoke some of that classic silver screen era brain teasing that a lot of modern films (even really lovely, excellent dramas like ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ fall into this trap) simply aren’t paid to do.
Modern films are so goal oriented, they refuse to give you anything but the most direct route to the end credits. Not all. Pretty much anything with Peter Dinklage in it is guaranteed to break your brain. I love that guy. But it’s very hard to find movies that aren’t pretty much built like IKEA furniture; so simplified you can build it yourself in the spare bedroom with an Allen Key.
I describe this to people (including my poor, long-suffering wife) that ‘Stories Have Shapes’. I got the idea from Kurt Vonnegut, who spelled out the classic story plots of history using very simple diagrams that worked on a flow chart principle. The thing is, really complex plots are more like effusions of 3D topographic geometries in my head, and I’m often swept up in trying to get the ‘sense’ of how a story is shaped by the twists and holes and sharp corners it throws up at seemingly random points. I’ve thought about charting them somehow, but I haven’t succeeded in capturing the essence yet. I once did a fairly complicated image that I used for a tee shirt design (even sold one), but I still haven’t accurately captured the way I conceptualize the organic nature of stories.
The neat thing that I keep finding whenever I watch a ‘new’ classic film (I’ve seen plenty, but there are millions more to go, and not all of them are clunkers), I discover yet another funny story shape, because back then, the rules and formulae we shape stories with today didn’t exist yet. People read classic literature back then. Shakespeare. Tolstoy. Brontë. Thackeray. Austen. The Bible. People were used to convoluted stories that eventually got where they were going. Today, that form of storytelling is largely eschewed, and I think it’s sad.
So today, I read a review of one of my favourite unreviewed classic films, The Maltese Falcon (it was on my list), written by my Comics Book Resources buddy Drew Anderson, who spends a fair bit of time in his review defending his stance on liking classic films, but not hitting on the points I would have.
So I decided to write this blog article. I’ll probably do others and add them to the series. Enjoy.
THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) - a film review
Director: John Huston
Producer: Hal B. Wallis (executive)
Screenplay: John Huston (based on The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett)
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet
Score: Adolph Deutsch
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Editing: Thomas Richards
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Release date: October 3, 1941
Running time: 101 minutes
Country: United States
Language: English
Budget: $375,000
Now, as my long screed points out, my main thesis here is that classic movie plots were largely less formulaic. That’s not to say they didn’t work by a formula; just that they weren’t slavishly tied to the most direct route to the end of the story. They took you for twists and turns. You often had no idea where things were going, even if you knew the source material (in this case, the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same title).
The story starts with Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) run a detective agency together (along with their ever-faithful Girl-Friday secretary; Lee Patrick). When an attractive-but difficult female client (Mary Astor) using an assumed name enters their lives, the first in a series of betrayals reduces the detective agency to a team of one. Spade admits to not particularly having liked his partner, and even has to deal with the man’s widow, whom it turns out had a little thing on the side with Spade at one point. But he feels bound by a code of ethics to pursue the case tot he bitter end and figure out just what really happened to Miles.
What he doesn’t count on is that his client not only lied about her name but about her entire motive in this venture, as Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), representing his boss, Kasper Gutman (played marvellously by Sidney Greenstreet), enters the story and tries to shake down Sam for a package that never arrived. Soon, Sam discovers he is embroiled in what turns out to be an antique art theft: a virtually priceless artefact of great historical and monetary value, called the Maltese Falcon, has made its way onto the black market, but because of a pair of double crosses and a convenient fire, no one knows where the black statuette is.
Eventually, the ship’s captain (whose ship has gone up in flames) shows up in Sam’s office, and promptly dies, leaving the newspaper-wrapped artefact with Sam. Sam immediately sends is secretary Effie to mail the artefact and get it away from him, knowing full well that the betrayals and potential deaths are far from over. And indeed, with the junior grade gunsell and the drugging and the police crawling all over him, Sam’s job gets harder by the minute. Add to that the fact that he is falling for his client, a woman who hasn’t been straight with him once during the whole ordeal, and eventually it just becomes apparent that Sam has to pull out all the stops and deal in a little manipulation and betrayal himself, if he wants to get out of this arrangement alive.
SUMMARY
The film has been the cornerstone of so many cinematic clichés over the decades since it was first released, from the fedora-and-trenchcoat-wearing gumshoe to the fat villain and the effeminate assistant, the double-crossing femme fatale, the incompetent gun for hire, the flat-footed coppers and the loyal secretary amongst many others, that the film description probably sounds pretty staid and lifeless. The thing is, not only was it very nearly the originator of a lot of those tropes, but it delivers them in such a way that they feel completely fresh and surprising, even today.
The thing is, both Drew and his buddy Kyle are right: many modern movie goers do have some difficulty learning to enjoy classic films, which are often slower, less action-packed, less convincing when the action and effects do ramp up, and of course, are often black and white (or even silent!), both in colour palette and in philosophy. They weren’t actually simpler times, but the movies make them out to be as such, and where we might watch movies and television shows these days that are much more cynical, what we often lose is the element of true unpredictability, which these older films mastered long before the forumlae became entrenched and the Hollywood movie system forgot how to truly surprise an audience.
I won’t say that The Maltese Falcon is the finest film ever made. It might not even be in the top one hundred, although that’s pushing it. The thing is, Falcon was and is a prime example of the Film Noire genre, the crime films of the 20s, 30s and 40s, and though many modern movie makers have studied and adored this and other works featuring Bogart, Bacall, Greenstreet, Cagney and Robinson, and directed by Huston and Hitchcock (amongst many others), most are forced to take a more modern approach to visual storytelling, and in the process, much of the complexity and texture of the stories is left out. All movie adaptations of novels and short stories have to take liberties to come in at a reasonable running time, but what has been lost to expediency and pyrotechnics can only be rediscovered by exploring the strange, often confusing, sometimes downright disappointing world of classic cinema.
I’m not Leonard Maltin, but I love me some good classic cinema, so we’ll do this again sometime really soon. Meanwhile, thanks for reading. Don’t forget to tip the coat check girl on your way out.
© 2013 Lee Edward McIlmoyle
SERIES INTRODUCTION
A year or two ago, my good friend Rodney Brazeau asked me to start writing classic movie reviews for him. I did a handful [1] [2] [3] for him and enjoyed the act of reviewing these classic films, but unfortunately, I found the act of writing the reviews for TheMovieSnitch.com to be a bit of a let down. They have an accepted and time-worn format over there, and it’s not really my style. Too brief, too direct. No room to really discuss the films at length.
That may work for most modern films, which are pretty direct and generally don’t have a lot of complicated plot points to avoid spoiling, or a lot of intense characterization to analyse (FYI: I’m not saying ALL modern movies are like this. However, there is a serious lack of ‘meaningful’ plot development in most of your summer blockbusters, which is what most movie sites are talking about these days, since so many of the films being advertised widely are summer blockbusters. I’m sorry, but yet another action sequence does not a real plot make).
The thing about classic movies from the early 20th Century up to perhaps the very early 80s is, the art of writing screenplays hadn’t been codified into the formulaic process it has become, where everything is counted in beats and the beats go by at roughly the speed of a bullet train. Again, don’t get me wrong. I love me some breakneck speed plotting, and the occasional action/sci-fi/fantasy/adventure film comes along that throws so many wrenches into the works that I have to see a chiropractor when it’s over. Films like ‘Inception’, ‘The Fountain’ (shut up, I liked that film), and ‘The Usual Suspects’ before it raise the bar for modern plot twisters that invoke some of that classic silver screen era brain teasing that a lot of modern films (even really lovely, excellent dramas like ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ fall into this trap) simply aren’t paid to do.
Modern films are so goal oriented, they refuse to give you anything but the most direct route to the end credits. Not all. Pretty much anything with Peter Dinklage in it is guaranteed to break your brain. I love that guy. But it’s very hard to find movies that aren’t pretty much built like IKEA furniture; so simplified you can build it yourself in the spare bedroom with an Allen Key.
I describe this to people (including my poor, long-suffering wife) that ‘Stories Have Shapes’. I got the idea from Kurt Vonnegut, who spelled out the classic story plots of history using very simple diagrams that worked on a flow chart principle. The thing is, really complex plots are more like effusions of 3D topographic geometries in my head, and I’m often swept up in trying to get the ‘sense’ of how a story is shaped by the twists and holes and sharp corners it throws up at seemingly random points. I’ve thought about charting them somehow, but I haven’t succeeded in capturing the essence yet. I once did a fairly complicated image that I used for a tee shirt design (even sold one), but I still haven’t accurately captured the way I conceptualize the organic nature of stories.
The neat thing that I keep finding whenever I watch a ‘new’ classic film (I’ve seen plenty, but there are millions more to go, and not all of them are clunkers), I discover yet another funny story shape, because back then, the rules and formulae we shape stories with today didn’t exist yet. People read classic literature back then. Shakespeare. Tolstoy. Brontë. Thackeray. Austen. The Bible. People were used to convoluted stories that eventually got where they were going. Today, that form of storytelling is largely eschewed, and I think it’s sad.
So today, I read a review of one of my favourite unreviewed classic films, The Maltese Falcon (it was on my list), written by my Comics Book Resources buddy Drew Anderson, who spends a fair bit of time in his review defending his stance on liking classic films, but not hitting on the points I would have.
So I decided to write this blog article. I’ll probably do others and add them to the series. Enjoy.
THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) - a film review
Director: John Huston
Producer: Hal B. Wallis (executive)
Screenplay: John Huston (based on The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett)
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet
Score: Adolph Deutsch
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Editing: Thomas Richards
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Release date: October 3, 1941
Running time: 101 minutes
Country: United States
Language: English
Budget: $375,000
Now, as my long screed points out, my main thesis here is that classic movie plots were largely less formulaic. That’s not to say they didn’t work by a formula; just that they weren’t slavishly tied to the most direct route to the end of the story. They took you for twists and turns. You often had no idea where things were going, even if you knew the source material (in this case, the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same title).
The story starts with Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) run a detective agency together (along with their ever-faithful Girl-Friday secretary; Lee Patrick). When an attractive-but difficult female client (Mary Astor) using an assumed name enters their lives, the first in a series of betrayals reduces the detective agency to a team of one. Spade admits to not particularly having liked his partner, and even has to deal with the man’s widow, whom it turns out had a little thing on the side with Spade at one point. But he feels bound by a code of ethics to pursue the case tot he bitter end and figure out just what really happened to Miles.
What he doesn’t count on is that his client not only lied about her name but about her entire motive in this venture, as Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), representing his boss, Kasper Gutman (played marvellously by Sidney Greenstreet), enters the story and tries to shake down Sam for a package that never arrived. Soon, Sam discovers he is embroiled in what turns out to be an antique art theft: a virtually priceless artefact of great historical and monetary value, called the Maltese Falcon, has made its way onto the black market, but because of a pair of double crosses and a convenient fire, no one knows where the black statuette is.
Eventually, the ship’s captain (whose ship has gone up in flames) shows up in Sam’s office, and promptly dies, leaving the newspaper-wrapped artefact with Sam. Sam immediately sends is secretary Effie to mail the artefact and get it away from him, knowing full well that the betrayals and potential deaths are far from over. And indeed, with the junior grade gunsell and the drugging and the police crawling all over him, Sam’s job gets harder by the minute. Add to that the fact that he is falling for his client, a woman who hasn’t been straight with him once during the whole ordeal, and eventually it just becomes apparent that Sam has to pull out all the stops and deal in a little manipulation and betrayal himself, if he wants to get out of this arrangement alive.
SUMMARY
The film has been the cornerstone of so many cinematic clichés over the decades since it was first released, from the fedora-and-trenchcoat-wearing gumshoe to the fat villain and the effeminate assistant, the double-crossing femme fatale, the incompetent gun for hire, the flat-footed coppers and the loyal secretary amongst many others, that the film description probably sounds pretty staid and lifeless. The thing is, not only was it very nearly the originator of a lot of those tropes, but it delivers them in such a way that they feel completely fresh and surprising, even today.
The thing is, both Drew and his buddy Kyle are right: many modern movie goers do have some difficulty learning to enjoy classic films, which are often slower, less action-packed, less convincing when the action and effects do ramp up, and of course, are often black and white (or even silent!), both in colour palette and in philosophy. They weren’t actually simpler times, but the movies make them out to be as such, and where we might watch movies and television shows these days that are much more cynical, what we often lose is the element of true unpredictability, which these older films mastered long before the forumlae became entrenched and the Hollywood movie system forgot how to truly surprise an audience.
I won’t say that The Maltese Falcon is the finest film ever made. It might not even be in the top one hundred, although that’s pushing it. The thing is, Falcon was and is a prime example of the Film Noire genre, the crime films of the 20s, 30s and 40s, and though many modern movie makers have studied and adored this and other works featuring Bogart, Bacall, Greenstreet, Cagney and Robinson, and directed by Huston and Hitchcock (amongst many others), most are forced to take a more modern approach to visual storytelling, and in the process, much of the complexity and texture of the stories is left out. All movie adaptations of novels and short stories have to take liberties to come in at a reasonable running time, but what has been lost to expediency and pyrotechnics can only be rediscovered by exploring the strange, often confusing, sometimes downright disappointing world of classic cinema.
I’m not Leonard Maltin, but I love me some good classic cinema, so we’ll do this again sometime really soon. Meanwhile, thanks for reading. Don’t forget to tip the coat check girl on your way out.
© 2013 Lee Edward McIlmoyle