North West Theatre Company Film Club MOVIE OF THE MONTH

The Maltese Falcon fits the bill for July at the Roxy Sometimes a single line in a movie sums up the whole story. Such is the case with the North West Theatre Company Film Club’s offering for July.

It is the classic Humphrey Bogart mystery, “The Maltese Falcon”. This American film noir, written and directed by John Huston in his directorial debut, was based on the 1930 novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett.

Bogart plays private investigator Sam Spade and Mary Astor is his femme fatale client, and the classic line, is Spade’s reference to The Maltese Falcon as “…the stuff that dreams are made of…”.

Gladys George, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet co-star, with the last appearing in his film debut. The story follows a San Francisco private detective Sam Spade and his dealings with three unscrupulous adventurers, all of whom are competing to obtain The Maltese Falcon, a jewel-encrusted falcon statuette.

The film premiered in New York City on October 3, 1941, and was nominated for three Academy Awards. Considered one of the greatest films of all time, it was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress to be included in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Author Dashiell Hammett had once worked as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco, and he used his birth name “Samuel” for the story’s protagonist. He wrote of the book’s main character in 1934:

“Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and, in their cockier moments, thought they approached.”

Other characters in The Maltese Falcon were based on people who Hammett met or worked with during that time. The character of sinister “Fat Man” Kasper Gutman (Greenstreet) was based on Maundy Gregory, an overweight British detective-entrepreneur who was involved in many sophisticated endeavours and capers, including a search for a long-lost treasure like the jewelled Falcon. The character of Joel Cairo (Lorre) was based on a criminal whom Hammett arrested for forgery in Pasco, Washington, in 1920.

During his preparation for The Maltese Falcon, his directorial debut, John Huston planned each second of the film to the last detail, tailoring the screenplay with instructions to himself for a shotfor-shot setup, with sketches for every scene, so filming could proceed fluently and professionally. Huston was adamant the film be methodically planned, thus ensuring the production maintained a tight schedule within their budget.

Submitted by Rick Hutton – NWTC Film Club Secretary

Such was the extent and efficacy of Huston’s preparation of the script that almost no line of dialogue was eliminated in the final edit. Except for some exterior night shots, Huston shot the entire film in sequence, which greatly helped his actors, and much of the dialogue from the original novel was retained.

“The Maltese Falcon” will be screened at the Roxy Theatre, Bingara at 4:00pm on Sunday July 30.