MALTESE FALCON, THE - DVD review

WB's latest set of Bogart films must be the third or fourth such collection now available on DVD. This one, called the "Humphrey Bogart Signature Collection, Volume II," contains five films that Bogart made for Warner Bros. between 1941 and 1944. Four of them are exclusive to the set: "Across the Pacific" (1942), "All Through the Night" (1942), "Action in the North Atlantic" (1943), and "Passage to Marseille" (1944). The prize of the lot, however, is Bogart's breakthrough film, "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), which WB have accorded a Three-Disc Special Edition, available in the big box or on its own.

If "The Maltese Falcon" doesn't qualify as the best private-eye yarn ever filmed, I don't know what does. Hollywood had brought Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel twice to the screen before this one (as you'll see below), but never better. John Huston, in his directorial debut in 1941, also adapted the script for this fast-paced mystery; and Humphrey Bogart practically bought the rights not only to the character of Sam Spade but to every future movie gumshoe who would ever pull a gat. In fitting tribute to the best, Warner Home Video's DVD transfer of the film is truly "the stuff that dreams are made of."

For Bogart, detective Sam Spade was a breakthrough part. Consigned mainly to play second-fiddle tough-guy roles in the thirties, Bogart had usually played heavies who died in the final reel. He did get good notices as Duke Mantee in "The Petrified Forest" (1936) and Mad Dog Earle in "High Sierra" (1941), but he was mostly getting plugged at the end of things like "Angels With Dirty Faces" (1938), "The Roaring Twenties" (1939), and "The Return of Doctor X" (1939). When he finally got his chance to play the lead in "The Maltese Falcon," he never looked back. The next year it was "Casablanca," and he had firmly etched his star into Hollywood's roster of all-time favorite actors.

As Sam Spade, the hard-boiled detective, Bogart is the quintessential antihero. He is the loner with no particularly noble ambitions or romanticized notions. He is an ironclad realistic. When somebody murders his partner, he shrugs it off as part of the job. Everybody knows the risks. And when it comes to love and women, he is equally pragmatic. Bogart may have become the world's leading actor, but he would remain the cynical tough guy throughout his career, right up to his last, wry performance some fifteen years later in "The Harder They Fall."

"The Maltese Falcon" is a story of double-dealing and double crosses in the search for a fabulous "black bird." The object of all the mischief is a fabulous, jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon that has had people cheating, stealing, and killing to get their hands on it for over 400 years. Now, a new group of scoundrels are after it, and their trail has led them to San Francisco and the investigative agency of Spade and Archer. "Trust no one" should be the byword of everyone in the story and the caution to anyone who watches the film. Lies, treachery, deceit, and homicide are the order of the day as nearly all the characters in the movie try to stab one another in the back in their greed for the bird.

The supporting cast were so good together that WB invited many of them back to costar in later Bogart films. Mary Astor plays Brigid O'Shaughnessy (or is it Wonderly, or Leblanc?), whose lies seem to mystify even her. Peter Lorre is Joel Cairo, the weaselly, effeminate little crook who would sell out his mother for the right price. Sydney Greenstreet is the Fat Man, Kasper Gutman, the urbane heavy (really heavy) imitated in about 200 movies since. (The film's closing credits spell it "Kasper," but Hammett spelled it "Casper" in the book.) Elisha Cook, Jr., plays the young-punk gunsel, whose felt hat and twin automatics are bigger than he is. Ward Bond and Barton MacLane are the cops, the sympathetic Detective Polhaus and the hard-nosed Lt. Dundy, forever hounding Spade. Jerome Cowan plays Spade's partner, the dandy Miles Archer. Gladys George plays Archer's wife, with whom Spade has been carrying on an affair. And Lee Patrick is Effie Perine, Spade's ever-loyal secretary and assistant. The director even talked his father, actor Walter Huston, into playing a brief, unbilled bit part as Capt. Jacobi, master of the boat "La Paloma," a fellow shot in the chest and still clutching the falcon in his dying grasp. Apparently as a joke, the elder Huston required his son take hours of retakes for his moment of screen time.

The dialogue crackles in Huston's script--as it should, taken almost verbatim from the novel--and the direction is secure and taut. Critics often credit Huston and "The Maltese Falcon" with starting, or at least popularizing, the film noir style so favored by crime flicks of the later forties and fifties. The "Falcon's" city setting, frequently photographed at night, its murky shadows, and its grim, derisive attitude toward people and their motivations all influence our dark perceptions of the story. Yet it is not a depressing motion picture despite its surplus of shady characters and suspicious events. Huston doesn't allow it. The film's vitality and pacing do not permit us to ponder for long the consequences of any one scene or action. Instead, we're caught up in the pulse of the film, pretty much swept along by its deeds, not even particularly saddened or surprised by the pessimism of its ending.

Trivia notes: According to John Eastman in his book "Retakes" (Ballantine Books, New York, 1989), "the lead role of Sam Spade was originally offered to George Raft, who turned it down because of his reluctance to work with an untried director. Geraldine Fitzgerald refused Mary Astor's role for the same reason. Portly stage actor Sydney Greenstreet, nervous and insecure in his first screen role, weighed 285 pounds at the time.... Appearing only briefly in the film, the 18-inch falcon statuette was actually one of seven duplicate figurines made as spare props, one of which made headlines in 1974 by being stolen from a Los Angeles art museum."


Video:
Warner Bros. obtained the best copy of the film they could find to transfer, and digitally restored it from original elements. A high bit rate ensures that the 1.33:1 (from 1.37:1) black-and-white contrasts show up strongly, the black tones, especially, almost always deep and solid. The picture quality is first-rate.

Audio:
The Dolby Digital 1.0 monaural sound is also quite good for its age, coming up as well as we might expect. The soundtrack renders dialogue crisply, and background music, naturally restricted in frequency and dynamics, is nonetheless clear and persuasive.

Extras:
In honor of the film's rank as one of the best detective movies of all time, if not the very best, Warner Bros. have given it not just an ordinary special-edition treatment, but a Three-Disc Special Edition treatment. The first disc contains the feature film, with an informed and informative audio commentary by Bogart biographer Eric Lax; a theatrical trailer for "The Maltese Falcon" that contains an introduction by Sydney Greenstreet; twenty-eight scene selections (but no chapter insert); English as the only spoken language; and English, French, and Spanish subtitles.

In addition, the first disc includes a Warner Night at the Movies 1941: First, there's a vintage newsreel. That's followed by the Oscar-nominated Technicolor musical short "The Gay Parisian," twenty minutes of the ballet set to an arrangement of Offenbach tunes, "Gaite Parisiene," and performed by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Then, there's a trailer for 1941's "Sergeant York." And, finally, there are two classic cartoons, "Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt," in color with Bugs Bunny, and "Meet John Doughboy," in black-and-white with Porky Pig.

Disc two contains the full-length film versions of the Dashiell Hammett novel that preceded the Bogart classic. The first is "The Maltese Falcon" from 1931 with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels, directed by Roy Del Ruth. WB made it the year following the book's success, and it is a pretty straightforward retelling of the story, until the very end. However, Cortez looks much too much like a matinee idol to make a convincing Spade, and he exudes little of Hammett's hard-boiled characteristics. The movie comes with twenty-one scene selections (but again no insert); English as the only spoken language; and English, French, and Spanish subtitles.

The second movie is "Satan Met a Lady" from 1936 with Warren William and Bette Davis, directed by William Dieterle. Apparently, Warner Bros. didn't want to duplicate completely a movie they had made just five years earlier, so they changed the title, the names of the characters, some of the plot, even changing the black bird to the Horn of Roland. Spade, now Ted Shayne, is a devil of a ladies' man and so troublesome the local civic leaders keep kicking him out of town. Despite its lighthearted tone, this version completely misses the point of the book and the other two films. It comes with twenty scene selections; a theatrical trailer; English as the spoken language; and English, French, and Spanish subtitles. Both films are worth watching once, but if either version teaches us anything, it's how very good the Bogart movie is.

Disc three contains mostly documentary material. The first is the 2006 documentary, "The Maltese Falcon: One Magnificent Bird." It's thirty-two minutes long, provides a background on Hammett, the book, and the movie, and contains comments from filmmakers, actors, and authors like Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Deakins, James Cromwell, Michael Madsen, Frank Miller, and many more. After that Robert Osborne hosts "Becoming Attractions," a documentary look at the career of Humphrey Bogart as seen through the trailers for his movies, showing the various ways Hollywood marketed him. It's a novel idea. Then there's a hilarious, thirteen-minute studio blooper reel, "Breakdowns of 1941," where we get to hear famous old actors cussing out their mistakes; and that's followed by a one-minute series of makeup tests. The last items are audio-only bonuses from 1943 and 1946, three radio-show adaptations of "The Maltese Falcon," two of them featuring the original stars, plus another version starring Edward G. Robinson.

Parting Thoughts:
As a testimonial to the enduring public approval of "The Maltese Falcon" over the years, other movies have parodied it and its characters many times. "The Cheap Detective," "The Black Bird," "Murder By Death," and "The Maltese Bippy" are a just a few titles that come to mind, affectionate tributes to the original. All of the films in the "Bogart Signature Collection, Vol. II" are worth watching, but it is "The Maltese Falcon" that a legion of fans continue to call a classic. Count me among them. If the big box seems too intimidating, remember that while the other films are exclusive to the set, you can buy the "The Maltese Falcon" Three-Disc Special Edition on its own.