Dangerous female

The Maltese Falcon (aka Dangerous Female) 1931 Warner Brothers (80 minutes) directed by Roy Del Ruth, screenplay by Maude Fulton and Brown Holmes.

Every old movie buff knows the story of the black bird: a canny private eye matches wits with a fat man, a fey man and a femme fatale vying for a fabled falcon.  

But two years after Dashiell Hammett’s pulp detective masterpiece The Maltese Falcon first came out and ten years before John Huston’s 1941 iconic film classic—and before the Hayes Office started enforcing censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—Warner Brothers released its first version of the story.

The 1931 film opens with an orchestral version of a nineties bandstand piece, the credits against the background of the cover of the novel. The camera flies in to San Francisco’s Embarcadero centered on the Ferry Building, then looks back steadily at the distant Ferry Building a good way down Market Street and pans 45 degrees to the left, probably at about Leavenworth Street. This is a crime drama set in San Francisco.

It turns out to be a pretty good detective movie.

It sticks close to the original story, as Huston did; most of the dialog in both movies comes straight from Hammett’s book. 

Ricardo Cortez, an Austrian expatriate who changed his name and styled his look on the classic Latin lover popular at the time, plays a ‘bad boy’ Sam Spade. We see him first in silhouette on the opaque glass of his office door making out with a woman visitor.

The door opens, the woman steps neatly around the jamb adjusting her nylons on well-turned calves, then sashays away, leaving us a smiling Sam Spade—less the businesslike and sardonic Humphrey Bogart than an earlier, lighter shade of the mocking Sean Connery as a young James Bond.

And like Miss Moneypenny, Spade’s secretary, the practical Effie Perine (Una Merkel), has seen and heard it all before. She ushers in a ‘looker,’ Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels)—who later does not become Brigid O’Shaughnessy as in the novel and with Huston’s Mary Astor—to get the story rolling.

There is more tension between Spade and his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long) over Spade’s affair with his wife, Iva Archer (Thelma Todd) in this movie than in the later version. When Archer is murdered, the affair makes Spade a prime suspect.

At this point, there is an interesting detail not in the book or the Huston movie which, as in the opening shots, nods to the role the city of San Francisco plays in the book.

Archer was shot at the corner of Stockton and Bush Streets, which is on the periphery of Chinatown; we see a ‘chop suey’ joint and hear what sounds faintly like Chinese music in the background of the crime scene. Walking away from the crime scene, Spade passes a Chinese man (uncredited) on the street who makes a comment to him in Chinese. Spade listens, nodding, and briefly responds in Chinese. There is no further use or mention of Spade’s knowledge of Chinese.

At the end of the movie, this man is identified in a newspaper story as ‘Lee Fu Gow, Chinese merchant,’ who turns out to have been an eyewitness to Archer’s murder. Thus it turns out that the information he conveyed to Spade at the crime scene informed the streetwise detective’s subsequent dealings with the people after the black bird.

Miss Wonderly brings Dr. Joel Cairo (Otto Matieson) hot on her heels, with Caspar Gutman, played with brio by the Irish stage character actor Dudley Digges, and his ‘gunzel’ Wilmer Cook (Dwight Frye) not far behind. Matieson, Diggs and Frye are not Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Elisha Cook Jr., but they are true to the characters in the book and work well as an ensemble in this piece.

Like many of its contemporaries, the film disappeared when the so-called Hayes Office of the Motion Picture Association started to enforce its censorship code in 1934. Warner Brothers changed the title from The Maltese Falcon to Dangerous Female to distinguish it from the Huston classic when it reissued the film for television years later.

But the film’s sins are modest for viewers now. Attractive women appear in gauzily coutured housedresses and negligees which tease more than they reveal. There are public displays of affection between unmarried couples. The dialogue is more sexually suggestive and subjects like adultery are discussed openly. And the men do a lot of open drinking, which was against the law during Prohibition (1919-1933).

The earlier film puts more emphasis on Spade’s success with women than the later, and less on the homosexual undertone in the book and the later film version, which pits Spade against the ‘lavender-scented’ Cairo, a sexually ambiguous Wonderly, Gutman and the young man he has travelled with around the world in pursuit of the falcon.

The Maltese Falcon of 1931 is satisfying to watch because the actors work so well together that the story rolls right through from start to finish.

            Who can blame anyone involved in the earlier project that first-time director John Huston would come along ten years later with a cast of studio contract players and stage actors and make a film legend?