On Australian Film History - Rod Bishop reviews THE LAST DAYS OF ZANE GREY by Vicki Hastrich, Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2025

In the 1930s, Americans didn’t believe sharks ate people.

Hollywood celebrity novelist Zane Grey knew they did, and came to Australia to big game fish in 1935 and 1939. The great white shark rarely attacks humans, but it was Grey’s holy grail and he fished at Bermagui, Batemans Bay, Hayman Island, Lady Musgrave Island, Sydney Heads and Port Lincoln. 

He also acted as himself in White Death (1936), a feature film about catching a great white off Hayman Island.

Zane Grey wrote over 100 novels and short stories. His literary output contributed to 112 films and 3 television series. Starting with the publication of his first book Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912, he became regarded as a major force in establishing the underlying mythologies of the Western genre.

Grey had a clause in his Hollywood contracts insisting the films he wrote should be shot on locations where his novels were set. This opened up the startling landscapes of America’s south-west (such as Monument Valley) to many Americans who were seeing them for the first time.  

At his peak in the 1930s, Grey’s novels and his Hollywood assignments earned him $350,000 a year. In today’s terms, that’s millions a year. 

Enough for him to arrive on our shores with a retinue of helpers, including a business manager, three cameramen, several boats, tents, copious fishing gear (valued today at $AU1,350,000) and 166 suitcases, requiring a two-ton truck. His elaborate camps were set up with kitchens, sleeping tents, temporary wooden floors and even offices where he could continue writing and managing his business.

His arrival in Australia was very big news. Some have even suggested the mass hysteria over Grey’s swashbuckling fishing expeditions in Australia are only matched in this country by the arrival of The Beatles.

Author of The Last Days of Zane Grey, Vicki Hastrich writes: “We just went crazy for him. As far as I can tell there were something like nine of Grey’s films in circulation when he arrived in Australia in 1935.”

The media fiercely chased him for fishing tales, Western stories, photos, interviews and public appearances. Writing home to his wife Dolly in the USA, Grey said between 250 and 500 visitors came to his Bermagui camp each day hoping to see him. 

Hastrich writes: “The constant incursions on his privacy at the Bermagui camp were becoming intolerable. The stream of stickybeakers wandering through had never stopped, all of them wanting something…One woman walked through the camp on the morning after the Zane Grey birthday party: there were no people, she said, but she did see the remains of his birthday cake left out on a table. This qualified as news, as did many other petty invasions.”

Grey said of Australia: “This is the greatest country I have ever visited…the finest fishing in the world…You are developing an individual race, somewhat like the south-west Americans. The New Zealanders are more English than the English.”

Despite the patronizing attitude to First Nations people in the cast of White Death, Hastrich says: “Grey had seen Aboriginal people as intelligent, skillful and knowledgeable – qualities rarely ascribed to them by white Australia.”

This very readable account of Grey in Australia is exhaustively researched. It details all of his fishing expeditions, his prodigious spending, his precarious financial state, his numerous extramarital affairs (some scandalous), his plans for Australian novels and his literary legacy. But love affairs and letters back to Dolly apart, we don’t get too many insights into the man. One, however, is his reaction to reading John O’Hara’s ‘dirty’ BUtterfield 8. He burnt his copy in the camp fire, then argued with defenders of the book on his staff, who promptly quit and returned to the States in disgust.

Made on a budget of $AU2,700,000 and shot on Hayman Island in Queensland, White Death can be found on three YouTube  files, although sound drops out for 10 minutes. Grey, on screen for the first time in a feature film, plays himself, and it makes a lucid definition of near unwatchable, wooden acting. 

Grey’s business manager Edwin G. Bowen directed, produced and edited. It was his first, and his only, feature film and it plays like an embarrassing amateur production. The predominately English voices are just one of its cringe-worthy offerings. So too is the portrayal of First Nations people, the lame comedy and the atrocious acting.

Then there’s the shark. The best parts of White Death are the footage of Grey fishing for swordfish. But decent shark footage eluded him, and as for the great white, the crew had to paint one shark white and also construct a model for other shots. The fakery is hopeless, and the pathetic chase for the great white sucks whatever life was left out of the film. 

White Death bombed and there’s no evidence of it ever being released in the USA. 

In 1939, only months before his death in California, Grey caught several great white sharks off Port Lincoln, but the fish of his life, a 17-foot great white escaped.   

On Blu-ray - David Hare finally comes round to appreciating TEA AND SYMPATHY (Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1956)

Below are four screen shots from the sublime "Shadowy glade" climax of Minnelli's 1956 adaptation of the Robert Anderson play, Tea and Sympathy. It's both this sequence and the extraordinary colour photography by John Alton, one of several pictures he shot for Vincente Minnelli during the fifties, that finally won me over, especially in this new 4K scan and Blu-ray from Warner Archive.

In fact it's taken me literally sixty years to finally come around to any sort of appreciation for the movie, so long has it has been a subject of disdain for me, perhaps thanks to skewed perspective.

Alton's single light source setups and Minnelli's Scope staging emphasize shadow, background and peripheral enclosure as much as they do the players. In this sequence it finally dawned on me that the subject of the movie is not only, as I always persisted in thinking, John Kerr's character Tom's "closeting and/or guilt resulting from the social constrictions of 50's America. In fact the substantially larger and ultimately more tragic core of the drama is Deborah Kerr's superb Laura, clad throughout the picture in shades of burnt orange, ginger and rustic warmth, a futile beacon of affirmative life against the grey and white suburban drudgery and conformity of 50s bourgeois America. Indeed the colour play in these Minnelli melodramas is easily the equal of Sirk's at Universal, although Sirk often extends the colour play to sets, decor and staging with coloured lights much as post expressionist painting.

If there's a real cry for acknowledgment and passion from a stranded soul buried in the daily inertia of suburban college town 50's America, it's not only John Kerr's Tom, with his affection for the classics and the piano and the light touch of his loafers. But also from the figure of Laura, left unsatisfied at the end. This penultimate sequence really delivers what must have been profoundly personal material for Minnelli himself, given his own bi- (or more majorly gay) sexuality and the trajectory of his professional life before and after Garland.

The new Warner Archive derived from a 4K scan and regrade is predictably a thing of staggering Eastman (via proprietorial "Metrocolor") beauty.

CINEMA REBORN – JANUARY NEWSLETTER ANNOUNCING THE FIRST TITLES and MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT VOUCHERS

 

Shirley MacLaine, Artists and Models

Cinema Reborn 2026 is off and running with screening details announced of our first four titles. We’ve taken over the Classic Matinees and Make it Musical weekend time slots at the Ritz (1-10 May) and the Lido (8-17 May) and we’ll be presenting four Australian premieres of four films from Hollywood’s Golden Age all in beautiful new 4K restorations. We’re also announcing here details of our multi-ticket concession price passes which you will be able to buy and use to book these titles as well as the eighteen titles to come. 

The Heiress (Dir. William Wyler, USA, 1949)                                                                               

‘It’s a peerless, super-controlled movie … Wyler’s greatness here is that he can hold the elements of the film in his palm without constricting the actors. He frees them.’ – Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

‘It’s immaculately acted and crafted – it’s one of the finest films ever made about nineteenth-century America.’ – Martin Scorsese

In mid-nineteenth-century New York, the timid and ungainly Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland) lives with her wealthy father (Ralph Richardson), who spitefully measures her up against his beloved late wife. When Catherine is courted by the beguiling but fortuneless Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), her father’s resistance leads to grievous revelations about the true feelings of both men. 

Montgomery Clift, Olivia De Havilland, The Heiress

Based on a stage play adaptation of the 1880 Henry James novel Washington Square, William Wyler’s elegantly mounted character study is a prime example of classical Hollywood filmmaking and among the director’s finest achievements. It was the biggest winner at the 1950 Oscars, taking home awards for art direction, costume design, Aaron Copland’s score and de Havilland’s performance.

For session times and bookings at the Randwick Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Hawthorn Lido click here

Only Angels Have Wings  (Dir. Howard Hawks, USA, 1939)

‘A completely achieved masterpiece … drawing together the main thematic threads of Hawks’s work in a single complex web.’ – Robin Wood

‘The most amiable great movie ever made.’ – Michael Sragow, The Criterion Collection

Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, Only Angels Have Wings

In South America, a group of intrepid pilots led by the laconic Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) navigate treacherous conditions to deliver airmail across the Andes, facing the possibility of death with every flight. Director Howard Hawks drew from his own experiences with aviation in creating this seminal adventure drama, which represents a masterful synthesis of the themes of his 1930s output. Co-starring Jean Arthur as spirited outsider Bonnie Lee – whose emotional openness contrasts Geoff’s stoicism – alongside Richard Barthelmess and Rita Hayworth in her first major role, Only Angels Have Wings is perhaps the quintessential demonstration of Hawks’s unparalleled ability to balance existential preoccupations with dazzling action sequences, humour and warmth.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

Artists and Models (Dir. Frank Tashlin, USA, 1955)

‘Provided the Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis duo with its finest screen hour … a dizzily reflexive play on movie illusion.’ – Adrian Martin

Comic book addict Eugene (Jerry Lewis) has lurid dreams about the adventures of avian superhero Vincent the Vulture. In waking hours, his favourite character is sexy crime fighter Bat Lady; unbeknownst to Eugene, however, not only is the comic strip’s creator Abigail (Dorothy Malone) living in the very same apartment block, but Abigail’s flatmate – and model for Bat Lady – Bessie (Shirley MacLaine) has taken a shine to him. Meanwhile, Eugene’s own roommate, self-assured painter and ladies’ man Rick (Dean Martin), has his sights set on Abigail – and, thanks to Eugene’s habit of talking in his sleep, an idea for a sneaky new business opportunity … 

Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Artists and Models

Shot in glorious VistaVision and featuring colour schemes that only Hollywood could invent, Frank Tashlin’s musical romantic comedy Artists and Models satirises mid-’50s moral panics over the supposedly corrupting influence of comic books while offering a sublime canvas for Martin and Lewis’s legendary double act.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

One Hour With You  (Dir. Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932)

‘This charming, richly detailed film is a jewel in the director’s crown, and one of the finest musical comedies of the early sound era.’ – Wheeler Winston Dixon, Senses of Cinema

Maurice Chevalier, Jeannette MacDonald, One Hour With You

Even though this pre-code reimagining of his 1924 silent film The Marriage Circle was originally handed to a young George Cukor to direct, Ernst Lubitsch stepped back in midway through production to take the reins, lending his inimitable style to this comic tale of a loving couple simultaneously encountering opportunities for infidelity with each other’s unscrupulous friends. Brightened by a dash of Viennese operetta, some Parisian boulevard humour and recurring fourth-wall breaks from male lead Maurice Chevalier, Lubitsch’s musical also benefits from the gorgeous voice of fellow star Jeanette MacDonald and eight songs mostly composed by Oscar Straus and Leo Robin. Nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, One Hour With You is a fine example of the slyly subversive sex comedies that Lubitsch and his contemporaries perfected in early 1930s Hollywood – the likes of which would shortly be wiped out by the arrival of the censorious Motion Picture Production Code.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT PASSES

We are responding to public demand by introducing a discount pass for those who want to see the maximum of Cinema Reborn at the lowest possible price. Five ticket passes are $80 and ten ticket passes are a super-bargain at $140. Each ticket allows a maximum of two redemptions per session.

To buy a pass for sessions at the Ritz click here and fill in the box for which Voucher  you wish to purchase

To buy a pass for sessions at the Lido click here and fill in the box for which Voucher  you wish to purchase

Volunteers

Cinema Reborn always has a need for volunteers to help on our information desk and to monitor the door at the screenings. If you would like to know more send your name to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com and mention which city you are in and your availability (Nights, Weekends, Daytime). If you would like to know what it’s like to volunteer then here’s a glowing testimonial from one of those who worked on the 2025 program.

“I’m happy to share that I’ve been involved as a volunteer with the Cinema Reborn film festival 2025. Over the course of the festival, I assisted with the smooth running of ten film sections, welcomed audiences and supported venue operations. Grateful to be part of a passionate community celebrating film heritage and restoration. Special thanks to Grace Boschetti and Kevin Cassidy for creating a warm, supportive environment for all the volunteers; it made the experience even more memorable! Looking forward to more opportunities like this in the future!

If you know a young person who might enjoy being involved in the presentation of Cinema Reborn don’t hesitate to pass this newsletter to them and suggest they contact cinemareborn2025@gmail.com to make known their interest.

Charitable Donations

The major cost of presenting Cinema Reborn comes from the screening fees paid to archives and producers. Since our inception supporters have understood the need for continuing support to ensure that the annual season is able to present the very latest and very best international and Australian film restorations.

Tax deductible charitable donations have enabled us pay these fees and keep our admission charges to regular Ritz and Lido prices (with the lowest student concessions of any similar film-related event). We have once again set up a page via the Australian Cultural Fund to receive donations of any size,  from large or small. You can find it IF YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK

On Blu-ray - David Hare enthuses over Errol Flynn's swashbuckling in THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN (Vincent Sherman, USA, 1948)

Mary Stuart, Errol Flynn, The Adventures of Don Juan

Errol Flynn's next-to-last swashbuckler, as Don Juan with Mary Stuart as Catherine. Below the female lead Viveca Lindfors as his compatriot, Queen Margaret of Spain. From the Warner Archive Blu-ray of The Adventures of Don Juan from 1948. 

Errol not only looks older but thinner here, although still beautiful. And despite a ten year gap from his heyday in pictures mostly directed by his loathed Curtiz and Walsh, he can still swash the buckle and do his own stunts more than convincingly. There are even moments between the relentless comedy when he looks again like an axiom of the cinema. 

 

At Errol's insistence producer Jerry Wald didn't engage Curtiz as Warners originally intended but gave him Vincent Sherman as a director more likely to allow far more license than usual for Errol to indulge in pretty broad comedy - for better or worse. Watching his facial tics here including the eye rolling, and big double takes to the camera, he also seems to be giving a backwards looking, semi-referential impersonation of his earlier persona. Despite this the Don Juan screenplay is, like the 1938 The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex set in that regent's age and the sequence of his (and Leporello’s, played by Alan Hale) first entrance to London is re-filmed literally shot for shot in replica of Curtiz' superb near-opening sequence of Essex triumphantly entering Madrid in his 1938 masterpiece. 

 

Viveca Lindfors

Curtiz also had the luxury of ace DoP Sol Polito who gave him a mind-bendingly beautiful sudden crane swerving to close up onto the first shot of Olivia de Havilland. Sherman now, and the screenplay for Don Juan simply keeps the parade going where it times out almost to the second in parallel with the ten-year prior narrative from the Elizabethan setting. Clearly we're now in a parallel world for Errol and the whole historical tradition in classical movies. 

 

Maybe it was Errol himself who wanted to recast the sometime somber drama of the Essex screenplay with a lighter comic view. Certainly the 1948 movie doesn't always play so well, nor reach as high as his earlier pictures although Lindfors gives her Margaret a degree of humanity that Bette Davis didn't appear to want to tarnish her character as Elizabeth from the earlier Maxwell Anderson-based screenplay.

 

So Don Juan may not be a peak Warners' escapade but it's worth it for the last dignified performance from Flynn. It’s another title of great interest from Sherman's own underrated work. And not least yet another peak three strip Technicolor title with costumes by Leah Rhodes (for the men) and Travilla (for the women.)

CINEMA REBORN 2022 - DAY 2 - MR KLEIN, BEAU TRAVAIL, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, TROUBLE IN PARADISE and BATCH '81

Jeanne Moreau in Mr. Klein

It’s the first of four days when Cinema Reborn will be screening from morning till night. Today brings on a brilliant array of restored classics. Ranging from one of the most brilliant Hollywood comedies of the 30s, Trouble in Paradise,  to our first ever film from the Philippines, the ferocious allegory of the Marcos regime Batch ’81. Something for everyone. 

Screenings start at 11.15 am with Joseph Losey’s Cesar Award-winning Mr. Klein, then a repeat of last night’s scintillating openerBeau Travail, followed by the first screening of Orson Welles 1947 noir The Lady from Shanghai with Welles and Rita Hayworth starring.

 

Rita Hayworth goes blonde, The Lady from Shanghai

Full details of all films with links to some superb program notes by Mark Pierce, Adrian Martin, David Hare, Geoff Gardner and Noel Vera can be found ON THIS LINK. Advance ticket sales that enable you to walk straight to the Ritz’s Cinema 5 are available on the Ritz website or you can purchase tickets all day at the theatre box office (regular prices from $8-21).  

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Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins
Trouble in Paradise

There is indeed some trouble in the Cinema Reborn paradise. A couple of rather sad notes. The proposed introduction to Trouble in Paradise by film scholar Ivan Cerecina of Sydney Uni wont be taking place. Ivan has come down with Covid and is in isolation.

 

We are also sorry to report that the introduction by David Stratton proposed for The Lady from  Shanghai on Friday night at 6.00 pm will also not be taking place. David is battling a serious bout of ill-health and is not able to leave his home at the moment.

 

Ivan and David have sent their apologies. Cinema Reborn will have somebody at the screenings to make some introductory remarks and we wish both of our  friends and presenters the very best for quick recoveries.

 

In the meantime, we have twenty four sessions of our 2022 selection to go. Enjoy.

CINEMA REBORN 2022 - Two final titles - Hollywood Classics - TROUBLE IN PARADISE (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932) + THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (Orson Welles, 1947)

 The final pieces of the Cinema Reborn 2022 jigsaw puzzle fall into place. Two films from Hollywood’s Golden Age – a brilliant 30s pre-code comedy from Ernst Lubitsch and a famous 40s film noir from Orson Welles starring the director and Rita Hayworth. 

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TROUBLE IN PARADISE (1932)

“TROUBLE IN PARADISE IS GENERALLY CONSIDERED PRODUCER/DIRECTOR ERNST LUBITSCH’S GREATEST FILM” – FILMSITE

Made only three years after the introduction of the “talkies”, this sophisticated jewel-thief romantic comedy feels like it could have been made yesterday.

Set in Venice and Paris, it’s all evening dress, opera, jewelry, nightclubs, butlers, grand hotels and a suave, sexy triangle between two thieves and the perfume company executive they plan to rob.

Exquisitely directed by Lubitsch, there isn’t a false note in the entire film.

Introduced by Ivan Cerecina, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney

To read Geoff Gardner’s Program Notes, find links to bookings and information about session times click on this link to the CINEMA REBORN WEBSITE

To make a booking (there are two screenings, evening and afternoon) on the Ritz website CLICK HERE

 

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947)

“AS TANGLED AND INGENIOUS AS ANY OF WELLES’S CONJURING TRICKS” – THE INDEPENDENT (UK)

Orson Welles takes on film noir with this story of murder, fraud, deceit, betrayal and, of course, a femme fatale.

Travelling from New York, to a yacht on route through the Caribbean to Acapulco, up to San Francisco’s Chinatown and finally into a playground amusement park, Welles plays an Irish seaman drawn into this noir chaos by a mysterious woman (Rita Hayworth).

Introduced by David Stratton, Film critic, Television presenter and historian 

To read David Hare’s  Program Notes, find links to bookings and information about session times click on this link to the CINEMA REBORN WEBSITE

To make a booking on the Ritz website (there are two screenings, evening and afternoon) book here BOOK HERE

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If you are minded to make a tax deductible donation, large or small, to support the work of our all-volunteer group and bring more film classics back to the screen in Sydney click here for  THE AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL FUND

 ....and if you want to maximise your attendance think about joining THE RITZ ROYALTY CLUB and save on all admissions. Seniors get additional savings.

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The full Cinema Reborn 2022 Program is now listed on the Ritz website CLICK HERE

 

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.