Content area
Full Text
Seventy-five years after publication, it is difficult to discuss The Maltese Falcon without first chipping away the cultural barnacles that have attached themselves to it.1 The novel and its characters, particularly Sam Spade, took on identities of their own from the beginning. Within a year of publication, The Maltese Falcon had been adapted for the screen by director Roy del Ruth, with Ricardo Cortez playing Spade and Bebe Daniels playing the Brigid character (renamed). All but forgotten now, the movie was successful on release and more or less faithful to the novel, yet it began the process of attaching personae to the characters separate from the original. Three years later, in 1934, William Dieterle made Satan Met a Lady, a silly movie starring Bette Davis as the Brigid character and Warren William as the Spade character, that attempted to turn the story into a comedy and Spade into a shiftless opportunist. Then came John Huston, blurring the picture memorably but irreversibly. With this third movie version of The Maltese Falcon in 1941, Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre became, for the general public, Hammett's characters. The increasingly common description of Hammett's novel as a work best known from the 1941 movie by John Huston may be true, but it is nonetheless regrettable because the movie is a classic.
From 1941 to 1942 and then 1946 to 1950, The Adventures of Sam Spade was a weekly radio program, featuring "The world's greatest private detective." Although Hammett's involvement was restricted to allowing the use of his name, the plots tended to draw on elements of his fiction. On the radio, Spade was a know-it-all, wise-cracking, smart aleck, and Effie Perrine was impossibly daffy. The program, sponsored by Wildroot Cream-oil Hair Tonic, took the character of Spade into the world of advertising and to the core of popular culture. Wildroot promoted the radio program with a series of newspaper comic-strips featuring Spade as a model of the well-groomed, macho, playboy-adventurer who solves cases involving stolen hair dressing. Gordon's Gin later used a Bogart lookalike, sitting at his desk holding a falcon in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and with a bottle of gin at his elbow, in an office with "Spade and Archer"...