Hammett and the Falcon at the Movies
Hollywood and The Maltese Falcon have at least this much in common: They're each consumed with the pursuit of a foot-high golden statuette. Hammett probably deserved at least a shared Oscar for the 1941 movie, most of whose dialogue comes straight from the book, but his only nomination came for a different film years later. Even without The Maltese Falcon, Hollywood has Hammett to thank for more than a few good movies, and possibly an entire genre.
Filmmakers have adapted all of Hammett novels at least once. Decades after Ben Hecht adapted Red Harvest as Roadhouse Nights (1961), Akira Kurosawa turned it into a samurai story in Yojimbo (1961), and Sergio Leone found in it the makings of his first Italian western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Paramount had a crack at The Glass Key in 1935 with George Raft and made it again in 1942, a bit better, with Alan Ladd. The Thin Man immortally paired William Powell and Myrna Loy as Hammett's husband-and-wife crime solvers through one superior, and several inferior, sequels. TV writer Robert Lenski turned The Dain Curse into an eminently watchable 1978 miniseries, with James Coburn miscast but well-tailored as Hammett's “Continental Op.”
Nevertheless, just as Hammett's literary reputation rests on one book above all, his movie legacy rests principally on one picture. John Huston adapted The Maltese Falcon (1941) with scrupulous fidelity to the book, knowing just where to cut and what to emphasize. He drew impeccable performances from a dark, wounded Humphrey Bogart, somehow perfect as Hammett's blond Sam Spade, and all the rest of his cast. It's a perfect movie, and film noir is unthinkable without it.
Film noir is shorthand for those doom-laden, black-and-white-but-mostly-black crime stories that suddenly appeared on American screens in the 1940s. A few critics insist film noir started with an obscure, enjoyable Peter Lorre movie called The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), whose script the novelist Nathanael West helped write, but almost everybody else traces it back to The Maltese Falcon (1941). This lineage makes Hammett at least the godfather of every noir, from Double Indemnity (1944) to The Usual Suspects (1995)—whose ending is unmistakably lifted by screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie from Hammett's great long story “The Big Knock-Over.”
So what movie earned Hammett his Academy Award nomination? Try Watch on the Rhine (1943), which he and Lillian Hellman adapted from her play, and which nobody would call his best work. Its script deservedly lost the Oscar to Casablanca (1942). Perhaps Dashiell Hammett's most lasting monument rests in a place of honor at the Copyright Department of the Library of Congress: a black bird, machined as a prop for The Maltese Falcon, made of lead but worth its weight in gold.
If you're interested in seeing other classic film noir, you might enjoy:
The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)
Double Indemnity (1944)
The Big Sleep (1946)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Touch of Evil (1958)
This text created by the National Endowment for the Arts for their Big Read web site: www.neabigread.org
