Sam Spade with a handbag?

Satan Met a Lady 1936 Warner Brothers (74 minutes) directed by William Dieterle, screenplay by Brown Holmes.

Women rule in this screwball comedy take on The Maltese Falcon that stands the story on its head and shakes mayhem and malarkey from everyone’s pockets.

Warren William, a character actor who played bad guys in period films, got time off for bad behavior to play Ted Shane, a louche, mustachioed Sam Spade stand-in who joyfully patronizes women and carries a tooled leather handbag for his pipes and smoking equipment—an ideal foil for practically any Bette Davis role.

‘Do you mind very much, Mr. Shane, taking off your hat to a lady with a gun?’ Davis’ starchy Valerie Purvis (Miss Wonderly/Brigid O’Shaughnessy in the book and other films) asks Shane one of several times that she gets the drop on him.

The movie opens with Shane escorted by law enforcement officials to a departing train, kicked out of an unnamed California town as an ‘undesirable’ and on his way to another called San Morego.

Calling himself Nash on the train, Shane meets a British grande dame in the dining car who calls herself Mrs. R. Manchester Arden (the British character actress Alison Skipworth). Davis’ Purvis, hiding behind tinted cheaters, is sitting close enough to eavesdrop.

Mrs. Arden turns out to be the notorious international criminal Madame Barabbas, a stand-in for Hammett’s Casper Gutman, later played memorably by Sydney Greenstreet in the John Huston classic. Rather than an enameled gold falcon, Madame Barabbas is on the hunt for the priceless, jewel-filled ‘Horn of Roland.’

So is Valerie Purvis. So is the clumsy, clubbable Brit Anthony Travers (Arthur Treacher) whom the fey Joel Cairo becomes in this version. Treacher was a character actor known for his British butler roles who, among others, most notably played P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves in films. He may be best known now for the food franchise that bears his name: Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips.

And on the sidelines is Shane’s secretary, Miss Murgatroyd (Marie Wilson), the ditsy blonde Shane pets and teases—though someone is keeping the office running, and it certainly is not the philandering Shane—another character actress enjoying the ride.

Screenwriter Brown Holmes, also credited in part for the first adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, remains remarkably faithful to the dialog, but Hammett’s plot lines turn into punchlines as these worthies romp round and round each other after the horn in this light, quick-moving studio comedy.

As police spirit Purvis away from the train on which she had thought she was making her escape with Shane, she tells Shane that he will always remember her ‘‘cause now you found a woman can be as smart as you. Someday you’ll find one who’ll be smarter. She’ll marry you!’

Guess who falls off the train into Shane’s arms?

MP came across this film in a two-DVD collection issued by Warner Brothers with John Huston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon, its 1931 predecessor of the same title, and several period trailers, shorts and cartoons.