Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 6

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

Image via VF: Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark; Left, by Paul Schraub/The Collection of Hank Risan; Right, from the Everett Collection.

That a gambling mogul has paid millions of dollars for prop Maltese Falcon of dubious provenance just feels ... perfect. [Vanity Fair]

The fake falcon is made of lead, Gutman tells us. Kemidov must have figured out what he had and crafted a replica to fool Gutman's agents. The question is, was there a real lead prop? Or, were they all plaster? If there was a lead prop, is that what Wynn has, or did he get Kemidoved? 
We may never know for sure.

(Have to admit, I've poked around looking for replica to put on my bookshelf. They're a little pricey though. On the cheap end, you can pick one up on etsy for about $85. But at that price point, what you can get is ... *coughs discreetly* ... rubbish. Go up $100 from there and the replicas start looking better, but $85 was already more than I was looking to spend, never mind the $200 ballpark.) 

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 5

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

What, we wonder (quite reasonably) does have Hammett have against gays? And Middle Easterners, for that matter.

Joel Cairo is, even more so than the women of The Maltese Falcon, less a character than a collection of stereotypes. He doesn't go anywhere without mincing steps. His voice is effeminate.  He's expected to take being slapped, and like it.

He's also the only character in novel defined by his ethnicity. Gutman is probably German. O'Shaughnessy must be Irish. But neither of them are identified as the Irish, or the German, the way Cairo is consistently identified in the text as "the Levantine."  He even gets a chapter named for him that way.

Cairo carries a Greek passport, among others, and Gutman, if I recall, refers to him as a Greek at some point in either the movie or the novel, but his wallet contains a note written in Arabic, and I don't think we'd imagine Cairo is a Greek name. He's probably Palestinian then, or Syrian, and that fact he's an effeminate queer earns him nothing but barely concealed contempt from the author.

Is it crazy to wonder if Hammett isn't perhaps showing signs of some repression by setting his story in San Francisco and treating his most prominent gay character so shabbily?  (I say "most prominent" because I think we are supposed to infer by his stroking of Wilmer's head after Gutman agrees to let him be Spade's fall guy that Wilmer is a ... kept boy?)  Hammett was actively left-wing throughout his life and, while progressive activism isn't a guarantee of open-mindedness to all ways of life and freedom from prejudice, it's a little surprising he seems so contemptuous of a character he crafted to be an underdog twice over. Hammett had children, was married, and had relationships with women throughout his adult life, there's no evidence I can see that he was gay or bi.

The times, I guess. We chalk this less-than-gallant portrayal of a homosexual Levantine up to mere parochialism and prejudice of the era.

Unless we're supposed to see how unfair he's being, and in recognizing the unfairness, hold him, ourselves, and a society that tolerates that unfairness accountable for their shortcomings. I'd prefer to think Hammett was doing undercover work here, and not merely taking cheap shots at an exotic Other to pander.

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 4

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

In the film, it's not clear what book Spade has at his bedside under the alarm clock and which Gutman enjoys later while they await Effie's delivery of the bundle. We know from the novel it's Duke's Celebrated Criminal Cases of America. 

We know from the Flitcraft tale that Spade worked for a detective agency in Seattle before coming to San Francisco, and that he's been partners with Archer for less than a year when he tells Effie he would sought to dissolve their partnership once their year contract was up. So, it tells us something that he's not just getting his information about the SFPD from experience, but that he's studying their history. Spade isn't only hard-boiled, he's well-read.

As an aside, he references Arnold Rothstein when discussing the case in the DA's office. I had always assumed that was a case from the book, but that's because my Tammany Hall and Black Sox scandal knowledge is somewhat and shamefully deficient. Also, because I haven't been watching Boardwalk Empire. Rothstein was  prominent New Jersey underworld figure who was shot to death during a poker game over failing to pay a debt. So Spade's observation that the DA has Rothstein on the brain while investigating Thursby is an astute one. (Rothstein was murdered in 1928, a year before Hammett started publishing The Maltese Falcon in Black Mask magazine. Timely for the story, but a reference that probably would have been stale by 1941.)

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 3

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

What's in a name? It's possible I've read too much into "La Paloma" as the name of Jacobi's ship already, so might as well speculate on the name Jacobi itself.

It strikes me as an apt name to use for a minor character in a detective novel. I can only speculate as to how Hammett landed on it, but I'd like to think it's a nod to the German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi: 

"It was in algebraic development that Jacobi’s peculiar power mainly lay, and he made important contributions of this kind to many areas of mathematics, as shown by his long list of papers in Crelle’s Journal and elsewhere from 1826 onwards. One of his maxims was: 'Invert, always invert' ('man muss immer umkehren'), expressing his belief that the solution of many hard problems can be clarified by re-expressing them in inverse form."

Detectives, after all, face hard problems, so how to think about solving problems would be a matter of some importance to them. The clues don't add up? Try reasoning by subtraction. Invert the problem and see if expressing it in different terms leads to insight.

To figure out who killed Archer, he's got to look at the problem outside the narrative O'Shaughnessy has fed him. He's got to see how it doesn't add up. O'Shaughnessy must be lying when she says she couldn't trust Thursby. Spade learns that Thursby's loyalty to her was unshakable. Miles may have been a fool, but he was too experienced a detective to be gunned down by a man he was tailing without getting his hands out of his pockets. "The man who shot him stood here," Archer says when re-enacting the shooting with Tom Polhaus. That a man did it is an assumption based on facts not in evidence. Spade's got to recognize the lazy thinking and subtract anything that followed from the false premise. He figures out while he and O'Shaughnessy await the inevitable arrival of the police after Gutman's gang have left his apartment to skip town. Jacobi, the mathematician, would have been proud. (Jacobi, the bullet-ridden ship's captain, would have liked to have know the sort of woman O'Shaughnessy was before falling in with her.)

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 2

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

Huston's adaptation hews so close to the novel that even the changed scenes and omitted characters could barely be said to haunt the movie as ghosts. Among the changes: we don't see Gutman's daughter; Spade's lawyer gets relegated to a single phone call; Effie doesn't call Cairo "a queer," and his handkerchiefs are said to smell of gardenias rather than the less recognizable chypre; we meet one hotel detective, instead of two; Spade doesn't force O'Shaughnessy to prove she didn't steal the thousand dollar bill that Gutman palmed. The changes are competent; they don't leave holes in the story or gaps we tend to notice. We don't see Spade take a meal in the movie, but the movie wouldn't have been improved by us watching him make a liverwurst sandwich. 

The one scene in the novel that doesn't make it in Huston's film that I would include, if I were to produce a new adaptation, is Spade telling O'Shaugnessy Flitcraft's story. It's a decidedly odd story, in and of itself, and it's even odder for it to be in The Maltese Falcon. While easy to see why the decision was made not to include it in the film for the very reason we can easily imagine the novel without it, I think we need to bear down and ask why it's there. Hammett wrote Spade as a man who spoke judiciously, a man who liked to talk, but wasn't a prattler. There's certainly a reason the Flitcraft story makes the cut. Can we make sense of it?

Hammett scholars will have no doubt covered this ground, and I'll circle back check my hypothesis against what more accomplished critics will have already had to say on the matter, but it seems to me that the story of a man whose perception of his life is blown open by a near-miss falling beam while walking past a construction site has something to say about Spade's love of Brigid O'Shaughnessy. 

Flitcraft walks away from his life, his family, internalizes the randomness of our existence, then eventually drifts back into a life that mirrors the one he lead before his satori and period of wandering. Beams stopped falling near him and he stopped living as if they did.

Spade has, by meeting O'Shaughnessy, found himself similarly having his reality shattered. He's in love with a woman he knows is lying to him, using him the way she's used other men as protectors for as long as she's needed them, one he finally recognizes as a cold-blooded killer. She's a beam that's fallen directly in his path. And he is very nearly ready to throw away his life and the terms by which he's lived it, to live a new one with her. She's shown him a glimpse of himself he's never seen and he's shaken to the core by her. Brigid is merely puzzled by the story, and it never comes up again in the novel.

Yet, when Spade tries to explain himself to her, to explain why he's going to turn her over the police, the Flitcraft story underscores the scene. He could upend his life, he could shield her from the law and carry on in a new way. He wants to. But won't. He refuses to be a Flitcraft. She's a capricious force of nature he won't bend his will to. His anguish is that he's seen what Flitcraft saw, but he's not going to let it change him. 

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 1

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

Gutman relates the story of the Knights of the Order of St. John to Spade. How, in 1539, they hit upon the idea of sending a golden falcon, encrusted beak to claw with precious stones, to King Charles V of Spain as tribute. The story he tells places the San Francisco-set noir in a (fictionalized) historical context stretching back through the 16th century to the Crusades. Gutman describes the Crusades as essentially centuries of sustained looting. The Order of St. John can pay such lavish tribute thanks to the Order's legacy of plundering untold hordes of gold, silks, ivory, jewels, and the like from the East hundreds of years earlier. Not schoolbook history, but history nevertheless, he assures him.

However, the historical motifs in The Maltese Falcon run deeper even than the Crusades. Hammett subtly, elegantly weaves a lyrical legend from Herodotus's history of the Persian wars into his pulpy detective story. Or, since I can't prove it, I've imagined that he has. It's part of the charm of Hammett's novel, and Huston's 1941 adaptation, that such a reading is possible.

Ships under the command of Mardonius, serving the Persian King Darius the Great, were caught in a storm in 492 B.C. while on an expedition to Greece. The Greeks, unfamiliar with doves, were fascinated by the site of the white birds escaping the sinking ships. They imagined, the story goes, that the doves were the last messages of love from the drowning sailors. The romantic idea made it's way into seafaring lore, and into song. From 1861,versions of the "La Paloma" ("The Dove") gained popularity in Spain, Cuba, and Mexico. This image, of a dove escaping a shipwreck, flying with a message of love, is not directly found in The Maltese Falcon, of course, but we see its dark reflection in Hammett's tale.

Brigid O'Shaughnessy, on the run with the stolen black statuette of a falcon, meets Captain Jacobi in Hong Kong and entrusts him with the treasure. He transports it to San Francisco for her while she tries to find a way to get rid of her no longer convienent ally, Floyd Thursby. Jacobi's ship is burned in the harbor when Gutman's henchman, young Wilmer, is careless with matches while attempting to find it in the hold. The falcon, dove-like, escapes the ship with Jacobi, and later is delivered to Spade's office by the bullet-ridden (again, Wilmer at work) ship's captain. Spade receives his love's black bird; but its message is of betrayal, and it brings death and blood with it from its downed ship.

Jacobi's ship is named "La Paloma."