8/29/22
Newsletter87
The Crack of Dawn
It’s already starting to brighten up.
I think that The Maltese Falcon (1941) is about as good as movies get. It’s also John Huston’s first movie as a director and he could not have done a better job. Oddly, I think, Dashiell Hammett’s book was filmed twice before: in 1931 as The Maltese Falcon with Ricardo Cortez (born Jacob Krantz), and in 1936 as Satan Met a Lady, with Bette Davis and Warren William. Why, I thought as a kid, did John Huston remake a book that had been filmed so recently, twice? That was before I saw the earlier versions, both of which have crappy casts. Satan Met a Lady just sucks, is wrong in all possible ways, and Warren William was a crummy Sam Spade. However, the 1931 version is pretty good, quite similar to Huston’s version in a number of ways, though being an early talkie it’s rather creaky in the filmmaking department. Ricardo Cortez made a good Sam Spade, but everyone else in the cast is miscast. So, the main thing that John Huston did was to cast all of the parts brilliantly, going to the difficulty of finding the perfect actor for Kaspar Gutman on Broadway, Sydney Greenstreet, and casting him in his first film. Beyond that, the 1931 version has one more scene than the 1941 version, which ends so perfectly with Ward Bond holding the falcon and asking, “What is this thing?” and Bogart saying, “It’s the stuff dreams are made of.” Fade out. In the Ricardo Cortez version it fades back up and Spade is visiting the woman, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, in jail. He tells her that he really loves her, will wait twenty years for her, then slips the female guard some money and says, “Get her anything she wants,” and leaves. I must admit, that scene moved me. I see why Huston dropped it, but it’s good finale that I wasn’t expecting.
I became a movie fan through cartoons. When I was a kid, cartoons were shown exclusively on Saturday mornings. At the age of five, certain that I was missing cartoons before I awoke, I had my parents buy me an alarm clock so I could get up at 4:00 (like now) and not miss anything. The first cartoon on that early was Clutch Cargo (with weirdly animated lips) that was on half the screen, while the news scrolled upward in teletype form on the other half. At 4:30 they showed the oldest, black and white cartoons, like: Betty Boop, the Max Fleischer Popeyes, which are far superior to the color ones, Felix the Cat, and other old, oddball ones. At 6:00, when I guess they thought the normal kids would start watching, it all went to color. But it was at this tender young age that I developed a thing that has kept me in good stead for the rest of my life – taste. Taste, in the sense I’m referring to, is defined in my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary as, “The ability to notice, appreciate, and judge what is beautiful, appropriate, or harmonious, or what is excellent in art, music, decoration, clothing, etc.” And many people, including myself, believe that taste is based on experience. Though I don’t drink wine, apparently you must try many different kinds to discover great ones. But my sense of taste didn’t develop with experience. At the age of five I knew for a fact that Daffy Duck was better than Donald Duck. Both are well-animated, but Daffy is funny and Donald isn’t. Now, Donald Duck doesn’t have to be funny – he could be a serious duck – but Walt Disney intended Donald to be funny, and failed. Warners intended Daffy to be funny, and succeeded. Therefore, I preferred the success to the failure; that which worked as opposed to that which did not work. And my taste appeared to me not from experience, but fully-formed.
The sun appears to be fighting its way up.
I'm so glad to read your take on the various versions of "The Maltese Falcon." I recently watched all three versions (there's a DVD set that includes them all), and I share your opinion totally. I was interested in "Satan Met a Lady" because William Dieterle was a pretty good director, and I was curious to see Bette Davis. But it pretty much sucked. The 1931 version by Roy Del Ruth had a lot of Pre-Code salaciousness, and I also liked the ending scene, but as you say, the early sound filmmaking was creaky. Glad I saw them, but Huston's will be the only one I see again (and again).