HOLLYWOOD'S MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION - Geoff Mayer examines the production of THE MALTESE FALCON (John Huston, 1941) and the Final (Missing) Scene

Editor's Note. This is a second extract from Geoff Mayer's new book Hollywood’s Melodramatic Imagination: Film Noir, the Western and Other Genres from the 1920s to the 1950s © 2022 Geoff Mayer . It is reprinted by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. mcfarlandbooks.com. The first extract  On GILDA and getting around the Production Code from the Chapter titled Film Noir, Virtue, the Abyss and Nothingness can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE

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Production of The Maltese Falcon began on Monday June 9, 1941, with a budget of $381,000 and a filming period allocation of 36 days. While this was a tight schedule for a first time director, the budget and filming period indicates that it was not intended as a B film. Huston’s preparations were meticulous as he sketched out each scene before filming began and he also shot the script in sequence. Over three days and a long Saturday night in the middle of July, Huston filmed the final confrontation between Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor). On July 18, following the burning of the studio “ship,” the La Paloma, on the back lot and a brief scene between Spade and Casper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) on Stage 19, the picture officially closed. 

The film’s climax involved the five principal characters: Spade, O’Shaughnessy, Gutman, Wilmer, and Cairo. It was one of the last sequences to be filmed and it consumed almost 20 minutes of the film’s 100 minute running time. This began with them waiting for the arrival of the Maltese Falcon, the discovery that it is a fake and the final confrontation between Spade and O’Shaughnessy. It ends with Spade handing her over to Dundy and Polhaus. As producer Henry Blanke wrote to Hal Wallis, this consisted of one “solid sequence of thirty-five pages of script and every member of the cast is in it.” The climactic confrontation between Spade and Brigid involved eight pages of dialogue, three long days of filming as the actors repeated the scene again and again to match the change of camera angles. Finally, the film’s epilogue, with Brigid looking “like a sleepwalker” according to the screenplay directions“,…led off by the law.”This final scene took seven takes to satisfy the director.

"...Spade, O’Shaughnessy, Gutman, Wilmer (missing), and Cairo..."

 

After controlling the events for much of the film, Spade’s vulnerability is exposed in the final moments. His determination to survive, and not be a “sap,” becomes the deciding factor in his decision to turn Brigid in. There are, however, significant differences between the novel and Huston’s version. For example, Spade tells her in the novel that he is going to survive and that she is going to take the fall: “One of us has got to take it, after the talking those birds [Gutman and Cairo] will do. They’d hang me for sure. You’re likely to get a better break.” Huston omitted this passage. Similarly, after Brigid tells Spade in the novel that he should know whether he loves her or not, Spade replies:

“I don’t. It’s easy enough to be nuts about you.” He looked hungrily from her hair to her feet and up to her eyes again. “But I don’t know what that amounts to. Does anybody ever? But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won’t. I’ve been through it before—when it lasted that long. Then what?”

 

Huston replaces Hammett’s pragmatic cynicism with the more romantic response from Spade: “Maybe I do [love you].”

 

Spade’s torment is evident in his appearance (loose tie, button undone) and body movements (head lowered, shoulders slumped, wide-eyed). After he tells her he “won’t play the sap for you,” she declares her love for him:

 

Brigid: Oh, How can you do this to me, Sam? Surely, Mr. Archer wasn’t as much to you as….

[Spade, distressed, walks away and slumps in a chair. He explains that when a man’s partner gets killed he’s supposed to do something about it. Also, because he is in the detective business, it is bad business to let the killer get away with it. Finally, he explains, he has no reason he can trust her. Staring into space, he continues]:

Spade: All those are on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won’t argue about that. But look at the number of them. What have we got on the other side? All we’ve got is that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.

Brigid: You know whether you love me or not.

Spade: Maybe I do. I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over, but that’ll pass.

[Spade stands up and pulls Brigid roughly towards him]

Spade: If all I’ve said doesn’t mean anything to you, then forget it, and we’ll make it just this. I won’t because all of me wants to, regardless of consequences and because you’ve counted on that with me, the same as you counted on that with all the others.

[Spade responds to Brigid’s kiss as the doorbell rings and Spade tells the police to come in].

 

Brigid enters the lift (above) with the police as Spade walks away. However, Huston’s script, in accordance with Hammett’s novel, contained a final scene. This takes place in Spade’s office where he tries to explain to his secretary, Effie (Lee Patrick) why he turned Brigid in. Effie, unconvinced, stands by the window, mouth twisted, eyes reproachable:

 

Effie: You did that Sam, to her?

Spade: She did kill Miles, Angel….

Effie: Don’t, please—don’t touch me.

 

A doorknob rattles in the corridor. Effie goes out to see, comes back, and announces Iva Archer. The story ends as Spade, with a shiver, prepares to reunite with his mistress, his dead partner’s wife.

 

Spade: Send her in.

[This effectively replicates the dialogue in Hammett’s novel]

Effie: “I know you’re right. But don’t touch me now—not now.”

Spade’s face became pale as his collar.

[The novel concludes with Effie]:

She said in a small flat voice: “Iva is here.”

Spade, looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly, “Yes,” he said, and shivered. “Well, send her in.”

 

Huston included Hammett’s epilogue in his shooting script but he never filmed it. In an Inter-Office Communication at Warner Brothers, dated July 19, 1941, unit manager on The Maltese Falcon Al Alleborn, wrote that filming was completed on the 34th shooting day, two days ahead of schedule with a budget outlay of $327,182, which was $54,000 under budget. In his memo Alleborn noted that yesterday, Friday, the Huston company had a 2:00 p.m. shooting call, having worked until 2:30 a.m. the night before on Stage 19. The first shot was undertaken at 3:35 p.m. and the filming completed at 2:00 a.m.with 14 camera set-ups and nearly 8 pages of dialogue completed. Alleborn declared that “the picture is finished, as stated above, but, at Blanke’s and Huston’s request we eliminated the ending, as written in the script, which takes place on Stage 3 in SPADE’S OFFICE. These gentlemen feel they can cut the picture without this ending, and if necessary they can always get BOGART. Their feeling, however, is that the picture will not need the ending written for SPADE’S OFFICE.”

 

Instead they returned a week later with additional filming to complete the revised ending which appears in the release print. This shows Brigid, Dundy (Barton MacLane) at her elbow, moving towards the door while Spade remains behind with Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond) and the fake statue. The actors were required to return to the studio to film a line added by script supervisor Meta Wilde, also known as Meta Carpenter Wilde. Later Huston claimed it was Bogart’s idea:

 

Polhaus: [picking up the statue] Um, [its] heavy. What is it?

Spade: The stuff that dreams are made of.

 

If they had filmed the final scene in Huston’s script, with Spade preparing to see his mistress, the film would be much different. By eliminating this scene, as Ann Sperber and Eric Lax point out:

The final note, rather than amorality, was of honor among detectives. Find your partner’s killer even if it means sending over your lover; be true to your code even if it means breaking your heart. Spade has done the Right Thing.

 

The decision to eliminate Hammett’s epilogue satisfied one of Joseph Breen’s initial objections to the film. In a memo dated May 27, 1941, he notified Jack Warner that Huston’s final script “could not be approved under the provisions of the Code because of several important objectionable details.”These included any indication of an “illicit sex affair” between Spade and Brigid and Spade and Iva, especially any scenes showing “physical contact between Iva and Spade,” any suggestion that Cairo is “a pansy,” especially any indication of “lavender perfume,” “high-pitched voice” and the deletion of scenes “21 and 115 where Cairo should not appear effeminate while rubbing the boy’s [Wilmer] temple,” the “fade-out of Spade and Brigid is unacceptable because of the definite indication of an illicit sex affair. There must be no indication that Brigid and Spade are spending the night together Spade’s apartment,” “Spade’s speech about the District Attorneys [sic] should be rewritten to get away from characterizing most District Attorneys as men who will do anything to further their careers. This is important,”“nothing suggestive in Spade’s eyeing of Brigid,”“no flavor of a previous sex affair [between Spade and Brigid],”and the “action of Spade putting his hand on Effie’s hip must not be offensive.” Breen’s last objection confirms that Hammett’s epilogue was included in the final draft submitted to the PCA.

Spade and Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr)

 

The reviews for Huston’s film were uniformly good. Variety applauded the film as “one of the best examples of actionful and suspenseful melodramatic story telling in cinematic form” in their October 1, 1941, review. The term “melodrama,” or “melodramatic,” is used three times in the review and it noted that it is a remake of the 1931 film with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels. The review concluded by noting that the film “is an A attraction in its class, and will hit biz of the same kind in all bookings.” However, Warners did not treat the film as an A attraction, as producer Henry Blanke complained to Hal Wallis:

I should think that the company after … discovering what they had in their possession would go a little after this picture but … it “sneaks in”—and in spite all this makes a success.

Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), Cairo (Peter Lorre)

 

The failure by the studio to promote the film also mystified Bosley Crowther in his October 4 review in The New York Times. Crowther began his review by pointing out that “Warners have been strangely bashful about their mystery film ‘The Maltese Falcon.’” Crowther, normally a hostile critic of genre films, described the film as “supremely hardboiled” although he viewed the film as “a combination of American ruggedness with the suavity of the English crime school—a blend of mind and muscle—plus a slight touch of pathos.” On October 13, author, film critic and art historian Richard Griffith, in a review titled “‘Maltese Falcon’ Rated Top ‘Number’ in New York” wrote that although the “biting performances of Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez made the 1931 film memorable,” the “new version is the best because it is the most cynical, depraved and brilliantly melodramatic. There isn’t an honest motive among the entire cast—which is why we accept the characters as real people.” Hammett, particularly, enjoyed Griffith’s response as he sent a copy of the review to his wife. Long time Los Angeles Times film critic Philip K. Scheuer also celebrated the film as the “finest detective-mystery movie ever turned out by a Hollywood studio” and he noted that “you’ve never seen a detective like Sam Spade. … In private practice, not above a shady deal or two.”Despite a lack of advertising, the film fared well at the box office, grossing $967,000 domestically and $805,000 internationally.