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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

When Roger Ebert's right, he's right, and his pithy assessment of last week's quiz movie, The Maltese Falcon (1941), nails it: "The movie is essentially a series of conversations punctuated by brief, violent interludes. It's all style." And man, what style! Even considering its source-- one of the finest, most enjoyable novels ever written, no matter what the genre-- director John Huston made a movie so dazzling that, as Ebert also points out, it "accomplished things that in their way were as impressive as what Welles and Gregg Toland were doing on Citizen Kane."

He couldn't have done it, however, without one of the most striking casts of all time, character actors all, including Humphrey Bogart in the role that helped define the rest of his career. Playing Sam Spade as anything but a nice guy, he's alternately hilarious and explosive (much like the movie's blend of dialogue and action), and it's a credit to the rest of the cast that he doesn't command attention at all times.

Of course, much of the rest of that cast played some of the gayest characters the movies had ever seen outside of Franklin Pangborn-- Sydney Greenstreet (in his first film) is always putting his hand on Bogie's knee, and his relationship with his young "gunsel," Elisha Cook, Jr., is also suspect. (In fact, "gunsel" was a slang term of the day with homosexual implications; today he'd be called a "bottom," which, considering Greenstreet's girth, must have been a fate worse than death.) And the gardenia-scented Joel Cairo, played to perfection by Peter Lorre, is more of a lady than the film's femme fatale.

If the film has any flaw whatsoever, it's the casting choice of Mary Astor. As Steve Perry pointed out in his email, as a sex symbol, she just wasn't that hot. (Astor in real life was another story, as her diaries attest, and her hands-on affair with George S. Kaufmann is well documented in Hollywood Babylon.) Rewatching the film, I was more impressed by Lee Patrick as Spade's secretary Effie-- later in her career, she played plump, nervous old biddies like Topper's wife on TV, but here she's likeable and attractive.

(The best actor in the film has only one line and gets no screem credit: the character of Capt. Jacobi, who staggers into Spade's office with the falcon and then dies, is played by the director's father, Walter Huston.)

Enough. If you know the film, you know it so well that you don't need me to tell you any more about it, and if you don't know it, for God's sake, get thee to a video store! So congratulations and a Mickey Finn to the following quiz winners: Wayne Palmer, Mark Gisleson, E. Yarber, Christina O'Sullivan, Corey Anderson, Jim Youngdahl, Bill Hearne, Hank Parmer, and Kevin Musolino.

P.S. Mr. Yarber also provided a personal Hammett-related story that, with his permission, I'm going to share: "I read the novel in one sitting while taking a bath in my then-new San Fransisco apartment. Hammett was very clear on the buildings and addresses mentioned in the story, and I quickly found myself identifying places I passed every day. (The villains all lived in ritzy places I would never be able to afford). In fact, as the story came to a climax, I found myself growing increasingly nervous... the action was getting closer and closer to the very spot I was at!

"I had a very strange feeling upon finishing the book, and soon discovered that Hammett had written it (as well as most of his other Black Mask stuff) at a small apartment across the street from where I was living! He'd made this apartment Spade's, just as Spade's office was in the same building where Hammett had worked writing copy for a jewelry store (the local Pinkerton offices were there, too)."

Posted by Steve Monaco at February 27, 2006 1:16 AM

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