my mother would be a falconress
My mother would be a
falconress,
And I, her gay falcon
treading her wrist,
would fly to bring
back
from the blue of the
sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my
little hood with many bells
jangling when I’d turn
my head.
—Robert
Duncan
Brown
Holmes, Maude Fulton, and Lucien Hubbard (screenplay, based on the novel by
Dashiell Hammett), Roy Del Ruth (director) The Maltese Falcon / 1931
John
Huston (screenplay, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett), John Huston
(director) The Maltese Falcon /
1941
I
have to admit that I have never much liked the 1941 film classic, The
Maltese Falcon. I’ll grant that with a cast of Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor,
Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Walter Huston (uncredited as the ship
captain Jacoby), it’s difficult to imagine better acting for this work. Yet, I
find the story so creaky and totally unbelievable, care so little about the McGuffin
of the work, the falcon, and find all the characters—perhaps with the exception
of Bogart—so morally despicable that I truly can’t fathom why so many have
loved the work for so long.
With that in mind, I determined to see the
earlier 1931 version with a respectable, if not notable, cast of its day—the handsome
and dapper Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, Bebe Daniels as Ruth Wonderly, Una
Merkel as Spade’s secretary, Thelma Todd as Iva Archer, Otto Matieson as Dr.
Cairo, and Dudley Digges as Casper Gutman. Perhaps, with the pre-Hays Code
freedoms this version, I hoped, would at least offer a soupçon of naughty
goings-on.
That it did, with Daniels bathing in the
nude and later being strip-searched by her might-have-been lover Cortez. Cortez
as Spade, presented as quite clearly having sex with a client in the very first
scene, soon after is telephoned by his partner, Archer’s wife to tell him she misses
his love, and later beds down with Daniels’ Wonderly, along with several
squeezes and hugs of his secretary in between.
Gutman, Cairo, and their protégé Wilmer
Cook (Dwight Frye) are all presented as quite obviously homosexual—although I
think that was pretty clearly intimated in the 1941 version as well—but I’ll
come back to that.
In the
end, I felt very much of a similar mind of those film historians who remind us
that not every pre-code film represented an openness of sexuality and other
more open-minded patterns of behavior.
If
nothing else, the 1931 version, directed by the well-known Hollywood fixture
Roy Del Ruth, only made it more apparent why I had never liked this story if
the first place.
For what I realized in the Del Ruth
telling—not so completely different from John Huston’s version—was that it presented
two different groupings of unpleasant figures each in their own way seeking precisely
what the Maltese Falcon and the real bird itself represents: speed,
determination, ambition and, most particularly, power, qualities which I least
admire.
In one corner we have what I might call “the
lovers,” Spade and Wonderly, who use their normative sexual charms—both of
which are clearly apparent in this 1931 edition—to get what they want.
Wonderly is particularly transparent about
what she desires: the money which the Falcon with its rumored jewels might
provide. And she’ll use her mouth, eyes, and shapely limbs to get it. As Gutman
comments to Spade: “Miss Wonderly’s admirers have been many, sir. And she has
used them all to her great advantage.” By film’s end we know that at least
three of these so-called admirers, Spade’s partner Archer, her partner Floyd
Thursby (who we never meet), and Captain Jacoby, have died as a result of her
flirtations.
After engaging (monetarily rather than matrimonially)
Spade she even shifts to outright sex. He may have told her that he will sleep
in the other room when she stays overnight in his apartment, but when he
returns in the morning we definitely note that the pillow next to her is
indented with the impression of a head. Even the crafty detective is on to her manipulation
of her considerable charms:
Ruth
Wonderly:
I know I haven't any right to ask you to help me blindly. But I do ask it. Oh,
be generous, Mr. Spade.
Sam
Spade:
You won't need much of anybody's help. You're pretty good. As a matter of fact,
you're very good. It's chiefly your eyes, I think, and the throb you get in
your voice when you say, "Oh, be generous, Mr. Spade."
The fact that—despite his natural
wariness, his hard-boiled attitude toward love, and his final decision to call
the police to lock her away for life in prison—he still falls for her, ending
the film (unlike the original work and the 1941 adaptation) by going to visit
her in prison and asking the section Sergeant to give her “anything she wants,”
meaning better food and candies charged to the District Attorney’s office.
Even this supposedly cynical man, when his
love for her is challenged, responds:
Ruth
Wonderly:
You don't love me.
Sam
Spade:
Oh, I think I do.
For Spade, however, that hardly matters.
He also is involved with the Falcon simply as a business deal, and money greatly
matters to him throughout the film, even to the degree of supposedly taking
Wonderly’s last $100 bill (although she, we quickly discover, is clearly
holding out a wad of money hidden on those sexy thighs). And he negotiates back
and forth throughout with Gutman for his piece of the take, even if he never
quite succeeds in seeing much money.
More importantly, Spade is the very
definition of a womanizer. It is no accident that the door of his office announces,
“Spade and Archer / Private Operatives.” They are not truly interested in
detection, but in their private operations with any woman who might pass
through their door. If he is fascinated with women it is only because they
represent male gratification through sex. The reason he will no longer see
Archer’s wife is not so much because it might put him jeopardy with the police,
who think he killed Archer to get him out the way because of his affair with
her, nor even because he’s busy with his new woman, but because Spade has no
interest in long-term relationships. The cliché “Love ‘em and leave ‘em” might
almost be his philosophical position in life. As Wonderly observes: “You seem
to have a lot of trouble with your women, don't you, Sam?”
Women are not beings to be respected from
this misogynist’s perspective, and the sweet names one attaches to women might
just as well be applied to male thugs who he wants nothing to do with. Knocking
at his door, the police are greeted with the following interchange:
Sam
Spade:
Come on in, precious.
Police
Lt. Dundy:
[walking in] Who were you expecting, darling?
Sam
Spade:
You, sweetheart.
While
some desperate gay boys have seen this as a possible “queer” reference, I’d
argue that instead it is utterly homophobic, an application of heterosexual nicknames
to men you detest. Turning the tables on her boss, his secretary does the same
thing to Spade, announcing Cairo’s appearance in his office, by commenting:
Effie
Perrine:
Sam, it's a gorgeous new customer.
Sam
Spade:
Gorgeous?
Effie
Perrine:
A knockout.
Sam
Spade:
Send her right in, honey.
Effie
Perrine:
[to the off-screen customer] Will you step in, please?
[Joel
Cairo walks in.]
Twice
in his office scuffles with Cairo the visitor, gun in hand, demands: “You will please clasp your hands together at the back
of your neck,” which might easily be misconstrued as an invitation to a blow
job.
If in one corner, accordingly, we have a
dangerous femme fatale and a misogynist, in the other we have a highly
homophobic trio of Gutman, Cairo, and Cook. While in the book Dashiell Hammett
suggested that all three men were gay, in the movie it is clear that Cook is
Gutman’s “boyfriend,” the word he even uses to describe him as he openly
strokes his cheek. Even more troubling is the fact that Gutman twice says of
the boy, “I loved him almost a son,” suggesting that the relationship may have
begun quite a while earlier, making the “Fat Man” not only a pedophile but having
partaken in a fantasy of an incestuous relationship with the gun-crazy boy.
Interestingly, even in the 1941 version of
the film, it is clear that Gutman is using the boy for his sexual pleasures.
Bogart refers to Wilbur as Guman’s “gunsel” three times in that film, a word
that Hammett changed, upon his agent’s insistence, from “catamite” in his
original manuscript. The Yiddish word (literally “a little goose”) had come
through popular use to mean the same thing: “a boy kept for homosexual
practices.” Hammett’s agent evidently as “a gun carrying criminal,” an older
lexicon entry.
Spade’s hostility to this entire group of
queers is apparent when he immediately demands
that one of them—preferably Cairo or Cook, since Gutman represents the deep
pockets of this affair—become a “fall guy.” As the least likeable of the group
and the actual murderer of Thursby, Cook is selected, but when they finally
open the suitcase delivered to Spade that contains yet another false Falcon, the
boy escapes through a kitchen window. As Gutman leaves Spade, ready to join
Cairo on a new return to the “orient” in search of the missing bird, he sardonically
sums up his feelings toward the “private operative”: “Good day, sir. I deeply
regret that you are left without a fall guy.”—which could be read, obviously,
as another sexual pun.
In the Del Ruth version, Gutman and Cairo
are killed by the kid, and the police have captured him. In the novel, only
Gutman died. Apparently none of these figures were worth saving in the San
Francisco of 1931.
Any LGBTQ observer of either of these two Maltese
Falcon films will find little to admire in this woman-hating and sexually-abusing
homophobes, nor in the truly perverted homosexual clique all searching for the
wrong things in life.
If, as The Louise Brooks Society blog wonders,
why Spade keeps a copy of the actresses’ photo upon his wall—and it does look a
lot like Brooks—it cannot be because of any admiration for the actor, but for
her portrayal in Pandora’s Box, released two years before Del Ruth’s
film, in which she plays the bisexual woman who, by opening up her box or jar—much like Gutman
and tribe opening the suitcase in Del Ruth’s film—let free all the evils of the
world, leaving behind only “hope.” It might be useful to remember that in G. W.
Pabst’s film she was eventually murdered by Jack the Ripper.
Los
Angeles, September 5, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2020).
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