The closeness grew over the weeks. Greenstreet and Lorre, raconteurs with scores of hilarious international anecdotes, broke up the crew between takes. The publicity department had tourists traipsing through the set until Humphrey and Mary conspired to put a stop to it. A group of priests heard her curse loudly; as a gaggle of middle-aged ladies passed by, Humphrey zipped up his fly and said, “See you later, Mary.” The tours abruptly ceased, allowing all the cast members to concentrate, digging deep into their roles. Astor, for example, wanted to give Brigid an unstable persona bordering on hysteria. “So, I hyperventilated before going into most of the scenes. It gave me a heady feeling, of thinking at cross purposes.” Lorre was appropriately underhanded and delicate. It was not his fault that the film’s one weak scene, in which Humphrey is called upon to laugh at him, is artificial and unconvincing. That was a script and directorial failure—the only one in the entire film. Greenstreet was a revelation, a model of underhanded bonhomie. The forty-two-year-old Humphrey could be as hard-boiled as Baby Face or Mad Dog, but here the menace is accompanied by charm and a vital integrity. Sam Spade has little use for cops, or for the district attorney, but he stays on the right side of the law—although just barely. He has an easy way with women (including his partner’s wife), but treats his secretary, Effie (Lee Patrick), with hands-off politesse. Wilmer is dealt with contemptuously, as if Humphrey were getting his own back after being forced to utter so many gangster clichés over the years. Holding a gun on Spade, Wilmer warns him: “Keep on ridin’ me, they’re gonna be pickin’ iron out of your liver.” Replies Sam: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” Yet negotiating with Kasper Gutman, the Fat Man, Spade is respectful and courteous. When Gutman asks if he knows what the black bird is worth, Spade admits that he hasn’t the slightest idea. The Fat Man smiles at his listener’s ignorance. If he were to disclose the value, Spade would call him a liar. No, Spade disagrees, not even if he thought so.
Meta Wilde, Huston’s assistant, described that first meeting of Spade and Gutman. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson followed Humphrey “down a long hallway, and finally into a living room; there the camera moved up and down in what is referred to as a bottom-up and boom-down shot, then panned from left to right and back to Bogart’s face; the next pan shot was to Greenstreet’s massive stomach from Bogart’s point of view. The choreography of it was exacting and exciting. One miss and we had to begin all over again.” But they didn’t have to begin again. Everything went off without a hitch. After about seven minutes of continuous shooting, “Huston shouted ‘CUT’ and ‘PRINT IT!,’ a shout went up and crew members heartily congratulated Bogart, Greenstreet, and Edeson and his camera specialists.”
Over the years, much has been made of Lulu in Hollywood, Louise Brooks’s memoir of Los Angeles and New York, and of her shrewd analyses of fellow actors—including Humphrey Bogart. She could be piercingly accurate, but she could also be perversely mistaken, as she was in the case of The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade, wrote Brooks, “was uncomplicated, but too much dialogue betrayed the fact that Humphrey’s miserable theatrical training had left him permanently afraid of words. In short speeches he cleverly masked his fear with his tricks of mouth and voice. But when he was allotted part of the burden of exposition in this film, his eyes glazed and invisible comic strip balloons circled his dialogue.”
Just the opposite is true. There was no other actor in the Warners studio, not James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, or John Garfield, and certainly not George Raft, who could have so effectively brought off the finale, with its crowded words and thoughts. A frantic Spade learns that the statuette of the falcon was a counterfeit all along, that many people, including his partner, Miles Archer, have died for nothing. The Fat Man, Joel Cairo, and Wilmer have fled, leaving Spade holding the bag in the form of a leaden statuette. Suspected of murdering Archer, he confronts the woman who has his heart, but who has betrayed him and killed his associate. He decides to turn her in to the police. In shock, she begins to cry. For the next several minutes, Spade explains his fundamental principles. He didn’t much like Miles Archer. But he can’t stand by and let the woman who shot his partner get away with murder. It would be bad for him, bad for detectives everywhere.
Brigid protests that these are insufficient reasons to hand her to the police, especially if he loves her. Spade has a ready answer: if he lets her go, she’ll have something on him, something she can use as blackmail. And if that fails, she can always resort to the gun, just as she did with Archer. He lists the arguments in her favor, then those in his favor. He admits that love is powerful, that all of him wants to let her go regardless of consequences. But the sad fact is, she’s counted on just that, as she has with countless others who enjoyed her sexual favors. Sam admits that he’ll have some hard, sleepless nights after Brigid’s been put in prison, but that he’ll get over it, and get over her.
All this was said in well over a hundred words (and he had uttered another hundred in an earlier expository passage). Yet those words flew by, tautly and confidently delivered. Previous versions of the story played up Sam’s wolfish tendencies, and the first filming sedulously copied Hammett’s ending. Iva (Gladys George), Miles Archer’s widow, is in the waiting room. “Send her in, darling,” Sam tells Effie. That sequence would have ruined the moral tragedy of Huston’s carefully made film. Yet he thought he had no alternative. He shot it as written, looked at what he had done, and hated it. After a discussion with Humphrey, the producer and the director made an epochal decision.
On July 19, 1941, unit manager Al Alleborn reported to the front office: “The picture is finished, but at Blanke’s and Huston’s request we eliminated the ending, as written in the script, which takes place on Stage Three in Spade’s office.” On July 30, Blanke followed up. The final scene would be “staged differently, as with their exit out of the room we will continue in the corridor to the elevator. Mary Astor and Lt. Dundy [Barton MacLane] will get into the elevator as Bogart and the other detectives come into the corridor and see Dundy and Astor descend in the elevator with last looks between Bogart and Astor played between them.” What he didn’t mention was the last exchange between Lieutenant Polhaus (Ward Bond) and Sam Spade. Curious, Polhaus wants to know what the black statuette is, and what it means. Says Spade, it’s “the stuff that dreams are made of.”
Humphrey himself had suggested the final line, with its Shakespearean echo of The Tempest: “We are such stuff / as dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”
The final sequence—the evidence turned over to the officials, exonerating Spade; Brigid arrested, Sam’s grieving integrity; the romance, like the statue, suddenly bereft of meaning—was pure magic. It would become one of the most fondly remembered scenes of viewers worldwide.
Cinema critics and scholars realized what had happened. Casting against the part, Huston had created (and Warners had underwritten) a dark, fascinating leading man with intelligence, honor, and soul. It had not been planned, but it had not been an accident, either. This was the greatest opportunity of them all, and Humphrey was not about to blow it. As Mary Astor wrote in A Life on Film, Bogart’s “technical skill was quite brilliant. He kept other actors on their toes because he listened to them, he watched, he looked at them. He was never ‘upstage center’ acting all by himself. He was there. With you.” This was not the customary behavior of male stars. However gifted, most of them had eyes for Number One. Their standard was best articulated in six words by the great Chaplin himself. Asked by a second lead how he should play a scene, Charlie said: “Behind me, and to the left.”
Other leading men at Warner Bros., as well as the other major studios, had experience in the theater. But few had appeared in as many Broadway plays as Humphrey, over a longer stretch of time. There are only two paths to top-of-the-marquee status in Hollywood: overnight success or a long, winding apprenticeship. At forty-one, Humphrey was far past wunderkind age. His ascent had been a lengthy slog through minor roles in play
s until his success in The Petrified Forest, and two-dimensional villains and second leads in movies until his challenging roles in High Sierra and now in The Maltese Falcon. But these outstanding performances were not what they appeared to be: a matter of luck and timing. All along, he had been picking up technique, sometimes accidentally, often deliberately. Over the decades he had learned how to listen and look at his fellow players, how to appear natural in the most artificial of circumstances, how to be rather than to seem a character. In the process, he had turned himself into an authentic leading man.
The sudden change of villain into hero had happened before. In 1939 Basil Rathbone, a suave evildoer in picture after picture, from David Copperfield to A Tale of Two Cities to Robin Hood, had been cast as Sherlock Holmes and a new kind of sleuth was born. This Holmes was not warm or likeable; he was only brilliant, intuitive, and above all truthful. He was also irresistible—so irresistible that Rathbone would be remembered more for that role (in fourteen movies) than for any other performances in his career. Humphrey’s story was not unlike Basil’s, except that he wouldn’t play Sam Spade anymore. But he would play the kind of character Spade represented, over and over again: wounded, cynical, romantic, and as incorrodible as a zinc bar.
In 1941–42, that on-screen presence was a man that Americans wanted—indeed, needed—to see. At the end of the year the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor triggered the entry of the United States into World War II. In the beginning the Allied losses were horrific. Manila was captured by the Japanese. The siege of the Bataan peninsula began, with the eventual surrender of U.S. forces and the resultant Death March. Germany enjoyed quick, spectacular victories in the Crimea, the Ukraine, and the Western Desert of North Africa. As young American men went off to battle, perhaps to be maimed or to die in distant lands, their home country needed reassuring symbols to hold on to. Allied leaders like Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and de Gaulle became icons, but that was not enough. Film stars were also transformed into figures who symbolized the American Way. The truculent James Cagney became George M. Cohan, the Yankee Doodle dandy. Tall-in-the-saddle Gary Cooper became the intrepid Sergeant York, sharpshooting loner of World War I. And the onetime crook Humphrey Bogart became the quintessential American male. The iniquitous could only push him so far. Once they crossed the line, he became an implacable foe—the story of the country itself, which had been slow to respond to the Axis of Germany, Italy, and Japan, but which now demanded nothing less than unconditional surrender.
At this moment in history, something about Humphrey caught on with the public: “Those lights and shadows composed themselves into another, nobler personality: heroic.” He knew it, Huston knew it, audiences knew it, and, most important, the studio knew it. Humphrey had crystallized the image of masculinity precisely at this moment in American history, and Warners was going to make sure he had plenty of A pictures to star in from now on, and lots of room to grow. There would be wrangles with the front office in times to come—that was the kind of guy Humphrey was—but there would be no more bottom-of-the-bill movies for Bogart, no more Wagons Roll at Night or Roaring Twenties. Once more he had arrived. But this time it was for good.
ii
In the 1920s Damon Runyon invented a literary scene. He called it Broadway, but it was a fantasyland quite unlike the real one, populated with gamblers and chiselers who spoke only in the present or future tense. Men had names like Harry the Horse and Izzy Cheesecake, referred to their girlfriends as dolls, and were as colorful and harmless as a bunch of toy balloons. (“Now most any doll will be very glad indeed to have Handsome Jack Madigan give her a tumble.…”) By 1941 the conflict in Europe had at last caught the attention of filmmakers. Warners came up with an idea: without exactly making a war picture, they could produce a comedy with Runyonesque characters versus German spies. That way the studio could take advantage of American sentiments, and yet keep it light.
The old, feisty Humphrey would probably not have agreed to play the part of Gloves Donahue in All Through the Night, even though the studio provided top billing and allowed him to stretch by doing some light material. But it was the summer of 1941, and he was back in Jack Warner’s good graces, and while good things were expected of The Maltese Falcon the reviews were not in yet. No one really knew which way the cat would jump. Humphrey began filming the comedy in mid-August, heading a cast that included the foreigners Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre, as well as the rising comedians Phil Silvers and Jackie Gleason. Either Bogart or a Warners press agent took advantage of Gleason’s bulk; Humphrey was reported to have said that Jackie looked like the man who had come to dinner—and eaten the guests.
He knew that All Through the Night was fluff, but a contract was a contract. Besides, the movie had a plucky cast. They enlivened the story, confected by humorists Leo Rosten (under the name Leonard Q. Ross) and Leonard Spigelgass, and had a lot of fun with the hoodlums versus Nazis plot. Humphrey, who saw plenty of vaudeville as a youth, was particularly taken by William Demarest. That vaudeville veteran was required to speak double-talk at a German rally in the final scenes. Humphrey could barely hold in the laughs as he picked up the cue: “How right you are, Herr Schultz, scradavan is definitely on the paratoot.” The picture turned out well under Vincent Sherman’s direction. Under other circumstances it might have had a chance, but the opening months of U.S. involvement in World War II rendered the film trivial if not downright offensive. Coy espionage agents were not going to play in an atmosphere of early defeats.
But Falcon was immune to the headlines. It was not about war. It was about greed and sex and integrity. And the notices were the stuff that dreams are made of. Time called the acting “practically perfect,” with Humphrey “giving the performance of his career.” The magazine also informed its readers of something that had gone unreported. “John Huston accepted only a slight assist from his father in his new venture: as an unlisted bit player, Huston Sr., sieved with bullet holes, appears long enough to deliver the falcon to Sam Spade, mumble a word or two, and fall dead.” In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wondered why Warner Bros. had been so “strangely bashful” about this wonderful film, and went on to praise the picture’s “excellent revelation of character. Mr. Bogart is a shrewd, tough detective with a mind that cuts like a blade.” The other reviews stayed on message.
The production cost $381,000 and was set to gross millions. An elated Hal Wallis sent off a letter to Jack Warner, vacationing in Hot Springs, Arkansas. According to some of the New York notices, wrote Wallis, The Maltese Falcon “came in ‘under wraps’ ‘on rubber heels,’ ‘was a delightful surprise because unheralded’ etc. etc.” He pleaded for his boss to give the New York office “a slight goose” and make them get behind the movie. That Jack did, and Warners reaped millions more as the reputation of their “sleeper” grew over the next six decades.
Studio executives tossed around ideas for the next Bogart picture. What about the adventures of Sam Spade, Part 2, with the same splendid cast? The next day the front office came to its senses. By Falcon’s fadeout Brigid had already been “sent over,” and the Fat Man and the other conspirators had been captured. Some other property would have to be used so that Bogart, Astor, Huston, et al. could be reunited while they were hot. Lorre was already working on another picture, but the director and three stars from Falcon were quickly signed to do Across the Pacific. Loudly ballyhooed, this Warner Bros. follow-up turned out to be a rather slapdash effort, quite unlike its predecessor. The war was on. John Huston, impatiently awaiting his commission, had much less at stake in this picture than in his debut film. It showed. Mary and Humphrey and Sydney got along well, but the plot was thin and burdened with propaganda. Even the love scenes felt spurious. Humphrey had never been very good at on-screen kissing; during a passionate two-shot with Astor she suddenly pulled away. As the cast looked on, she snapped, “Try not to knock my teeth out next time.” Acknowledged Humphrey, “I don’t like love scenes, maybe because I don’t do them very well. It isn�
��t possible to shoot a love scene without having a hairy-chested group of grips standing four feet away from you, chewing tobacco. I’ll handle that in the privacy of my bedroom.”
The feature was based on Aloha Means Goodbye, a popular international thriller centered on the Japanese plot to bomb Pearl Harbor. A year later, that scheme was old news; a rewrite focused on the Panama Canal and its vulnerability to bombers from Imperial Japan. Humphrey starred as a cashiered officer, sullen, disobedient, ready to sell out to any country that meets his price. Actually he is nothing of the kind; he’s an undercover U.S. agent who has been put aboard the Genoa Maru, a cargo ship headed for the Canal Zone, in order to attract bidders and collect military intelligence. During the days at sea he meets Dr. Lorenz (Greenstreet), a great admirer of the Japanese (“An amazing little people”); Alberta Marlow (Astor), whose background remains a mystery; and a slew of suspicious Asians who smile insincerely, sneak around, and speak broken English. West Coast nisei (Japanese Americans) were being rounded up and sent to internment camps in 1942; Japanese behavior in Across the Pacific accorded with the racial stereotyping of the day. With Japanese actors out of favor, the film made do with Chinese performers like Victor Sen Yung and Lee Tung Foo—most viewers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyway.
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