Starring Bebe Daniels, Ricardo Cortez, Dudley Digges
Produced by Warner Bros.
Detective Sam Spade (NOT played by Humphrey Bogart) takes on the case of a woman with a mysterious request. After Sam's partner is killed trailing a man who himself turns up dead.
Spade finds himself trapped between a woman who may be the only one he can ever truly love and a mysterious man who will stop at nothing to acquire a certain avian-themed trophy.
Can Sam find the bird, end up with the girl and escape the police?
The second you say the words "The Maltese Falcon," certain images and words come to mind.
Bogey. Peter Lorre. "The stuff that dreams are made of."
None of that is here. Instead, we get Ricardo Cortez and Otto Matieson. And the final lines of The Maltese Falcon in 1931 come nowhere near Spade's iconic final words a decade later.
Rather than fight the comparison, let's embrace it. The biggest difference between this version and its more famous remake is its tone. The Sam Spade of 1931 as played with Cortez is playful and cheery, even when the chips seem to be down. Gone is Bogart's world-weary approach. This Spade is more Bugs Bunny, a character who will come out on top because... well, he will.
That creates a big problem in the 1931 version as Cortez' acting combined with the script strip any tension away from the movie. It's hard to worry about your hero when he spends half of the film practically winking at the camera.
The other big difference here is the pre-Code aspect of the film. We get shots of femme fatale Ruth Wonderly in a bathtub, her body just inches away from revealing too much. The homosexual undertones of Gutman's relationship with his henchman are explicit here.
I do like a lot of the acting here. Cortez is having a ball, Bebe Daniels' Ruth is pitch perfect in every scene and Mathieson's portrayal of Cairo is suitably creepy.
However, all of the movie's problems can be summed up in the film's final moments. Spade shares a moment with the woman he was doomed to love, but has to turn it into a joke and a guffaw. There's no sense of lingering pain as the credits roll. Just the inconsistency that was there throughout the movie.
There is a masterpiece version of The Maltese Falcon. This isn't it. This is merely a good version that suffers from inconsistencies in acting styles and tone, deficiencies made all the more apparent when this tale is spun ten years later.
*** out of *****
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