Comparisons are Odious: the earlier adaptations of Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon”

For decades, I put off seeing either Roy del Ruth’s 1931 version of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, much less 1936’s “Satan Met a Lady.” I am glad I got around to them for several reasons, but before we get to those in order to treat them more on their own grounds, most people would probably want to know how they measure up to the John Huston classic. 

They don’t. 

There. That should do it, except that I know it doesn’t. Actually, let’s just get into them and as I go along, I’ll make some notes about what Huston and his cast and crew did that made 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon” the masterwork it is.

For starters, both of the earlier films treat the story as a lightweight comedy to varying degrees. The earlier version is more faithful to the book and while Ricardo Cortez is immensely charming and naturalistic in his performance, he plays Sam Spade as more of a devilish cad than a world-weary private eye. William Warren’s iteration as “Ted Shane” (all the characters’ names were changed in “Satan Met a Lady”; I don’t know why) is even more of a devil-may-care rake and we’ll get to that to momentarily. For now, it’s best to just say that “Satan Met a Lady” is broad comedy and in some cases, slapstick. 

In Roy del Ruth’s version, some effort is made to render the characters as individuals with some degree of interior life and agency. In William Dieterle’s, we get types at best. 

As much as the dialog is mostly pulled from the book itself, it is s remarkable how different the readings are. I get that del Ruth may have wanted a stagier, more drawing-room type motion picture, but the choices Dieterle made are baffling and in an odd way, daring. That doesn’t save the film quite, but I can’t say it’s dull. Or particularly good.

To be sure, the earlier version is the superior vehicle and not without some striking images. The performances are all fine to very good; these people were such pros. But here’s where the odiousness of comparison comes in. There isn’t a performance in del Ruth’s version that comes close to any in Huston’s. Additionally, Huston’s film clocks in with more than a half hour of running time and gives the characters space to breathe and the actors time to, well, act.

If Cortez is no Sam Spade, Bebe Daniels is no Mary Astor. I don’t know why Brigid O’Shaughnessy gets a name change here, but she does and it doesn’t change the character but “Ruth Wonderly” is a kind of dopey name for a femme fatale. Una Merkel as Effie Perine, now that I think of it, does pretty much match Lee Patrick’s iteration of Spade’s secretary. She is a bit tougher in some ways, but still doesn’t mind taking advantage of the boss nor he of her. Walter Long in del Ruth’s version is a close match, too, for Jerome Cowan’s Miles Archer. Come to think of it Long’s Archer is even more tragic as we see Spade throw his affair with Iva Archer pretty much in her husband’s face. It’s cruel, but not played for laughs as it comes across in “Satan…”

Then we come to Gutman, Joel Cairo, and Wilmer. An unbeatable rogues gallery, if there ever were one, personified by Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook, Jr., respectively. In the ‘31 version, we have Dudley Digges, a fine Irish actor who nails the role almost as well as Greenstreet; Otto Matieson as Cairo, is malevolent, but nowhere near as terrifying as Lorre, and perhaps the only other actor to measure up to the latter casting is Dwight Frye as Wilmer Cook, the gunsel who is likely Gutman’s protégé/lover. This being pre-Code, the innuendo flies and in some cases is not innuendo, at all. Seeing Frye, fresh from “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” was a pleasant surprise. He isn’t given much to do, but like Cook, conveys a whole shitty person in the few scenes he has. “The gaudier the patter, the cheaper the crook.” Sadly, that’s not a line we hear in either of the earlier versions.

The story lines are almost exactly the same between the ‘31 and ‘41 films. But the films are wildly different in what they accomplish. 

As I mentioned, the earlier is played lightly. We still have a sense that Spade is a hard man, but Cortez is so pretty and playing Spade more like Errol Flynn than a guy who’s seen too much of humanity’s worst. Compared to Bogart’s rendering, this earlier Spade is a fopping pretender. That said, there are moments when we get a sense of Spade’s cynicism and his callousness is on full view, but playing out too lightly to have any real edge to it. Lastly, and in another odd cut from the novel, there is none of Spade’s sense of honor as a motivation for seeing Brigid, uh, Ruth, hang or maybe get out in twenty years.

There is a moral weight to Huston’s version completely lacking here and in the 1936 version. Yes, Sam Spade is a shit. He’s a cynic and solves the mystery of the bird by sheer fumbling; but he’s the smartest guy in the room because he doesn’t believe anything anyone is telling him. Most of all, he knows one of these bastards killed his partner and while he didn’t particularly care about Miles Archer (and perhaps not even Iva), “when your partner is murdered, you’re expected to do something about it” (paraphrase; I don’t think I have that line accurately memorized.)

Absent that rationale, Cortez’s Spade just comes across as a smiling bastard to whom your life, really, precious, does not matter.

The denouement is the same, too, thankfully. Spade has set Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer against one another and the scene when they discover the bird is a fake is delicious, almost as good as the Lorre/Greenstreet meltdown. 

I mentioned the dialog is pretty much from the novel and the film follows Hammett pretty closely, so my assumption is that the choices that were made in terms of how long each scene was to be, staging, and locale were determined by committee; the 1931 film boasts three screen writers, including Brown Holmes who was credited on “Satan Met a Lady”, as well. I can’t help but think that the producers at Warner’s just said, “oh, let’s take the old script and reuse it” and neglected to credit Maude Fulton and Lucien Hubbard (who was uncredited the first time around). 

William Rees, whose cinematography I’ve mentioned briefly, acquits himself well here. The camera is a bit more static and is comprised of more set-ups than dynamic movement, but he got the job done. Arthur Edeson’s work on both of the later films ably told the story and gave us a better sense of the characters visually (such as they were in “Satan…”). 

Altogether, the 1931 opus is worth checking out.

I am hesitant to say the same about “Satan Met a Lady”. While it follows the book in general terms, the choices made on Dieterle and I have to assume Holmes’ parts, are baffling. By now the Hayes Code was in effect, so some changes makes sense in a weird way. Wilmer, here named Kenneth and played by Maynard Holmes, is a stunted man-baby to Madam Barrabbas (a genuinely fascinating turn by Alison Skipworth) who is the Kasper Gutman character in drag, thus removing the overtones/subtext of homosexuality and replacing it with a Ma Barker figure and/or somewhat disconcerting Oedipal relationship. Holmes, by the way, is almost as creepy as both Cook and Frye. I give him credit for playing the character as a more cocksure clown than the other two. In a film that plays for laughs, his might be the only performance with any genuine grounding.

If Ricardo Cortez is no Bogart, Warren Williams is no Cortez. Is he a Bogart, though? No. No, he is not. He could have been. He has a rougher face and it wouldn’t be a stretch to see him bring a darker game to the character but that is not the direction he was given. His Ted Shane is Sam Spade on nitrous oxide. Shane is such an element of danger and corruption that he is driven out of San Francisco by train to some small town where he was partner in a detective agency with Milton Ames, a much more affable character than Miles Archer, played by Porter Hall as a genuinely nice guy. 

This last just paints the Shane character as more of a well-dressed frat boy goon when he flirts with Ames wife. Either it’s the Code or the general ineptness of the proceedings, but for all that Ted Shane is a horn dog, the back and forth between him and Astrid Ames is comparatively toothless to both the del Ruth and the Huston versions. That said, Wini Shaw does her best with the character (as Thelma Todd did in ‘31’s version.) 

As for the Brigid O’Shaughnessy character, we have Bette Davis, who famously hated this script and this movie and told Jack Warner she wasn’t going to do this kind of “junk” (her word) anymore. After “The Petrified Forest” (with Bogart, famously), she really thought she would be getting better scripts. This was not one of those.

Davis is game and gives it her all, but Valerie Purvis is so thin a sketch of a woman that there is little for her to hang onto or do much with. 

The Joel Cairo character here is an Englishman, Anthony Travers played by Arthur Treacher, who piles on more comic relief than active threat, and frankly, because almost all the characters are so similarly drawn, it’s difficult to care. The stakes, though similar, feel weightless. And this is why, even if comparisons are odious, they are valuable. Particularly for film students or anyone who studies any art. 

In this case, though, we are dealing with the same text and for all intents and purposes, the same script and the result is three very different films. One is a stone masterpiece of cinema and one of the greatest directorial debuts; another is a serviceable to very good divertissement; and the last one, this one, is borderline stupid, though not without some interest because, well, of an alluring weirdness in the choices made.

“Satan” in the title, likely refers to Spade/Shane. In the book, Hammett describes his “wooden Satan’s face” at one point. But even that seems to be mocking the source material here. In this film, Shane’s partner is killed in a graveyard as opposed to an alleyway. The Effie Perine character (“MIss Murgatroyd” here and played with as much enthusiasm as anyone has in this film by Marie Wilson) is a secretary who surely must have stumbled into the job on the way to the nearest dancehall. If nothing else, Wilson’s read on the character has a couple of shades sadly lacking from just about everyone else’s. 

Gone is Spade’s pitting the principles against one another as a studied strategy to be replaced by a last minute, “ha! Gotcha! This was my plan all along!” This is only one instance where it felt like Dieterle didn’t want to invest in a story that might just reward people’s interest (which would have to be there in the first place).

Fortunately, Edeson’s lens is dynamic enough to keep us from getting too fed up. He shoots the actors with a shrewd eye and seems to know that they’ve been stuck with a half-assed script. The dialog, again, is mostly straight from the book but if the earlier version didn’t quite know what to do with Hammett’s distinct voice, “Satan.. “ is completely clueless. The scene where Shane/Spade is telling Valerie/Brigid that he’s been offered five thousand dollars for - oh, right, it’s not the black bird here, it’s the French hero Roland’s horn, allegedly filled with rare gems) the horn is so played so emphatically that it loses any of the coolness with which that scene played out in the novel (and perfectly, between Bogart and Astor later). 

This is another of those frustrating examples of a troupe of actors who are doing the best they can with a bizzare, if not pointless script. What should have been a fairly taut film, even if played with humor, is defanged of any substance and despite the gags and there are gags, it is a singular tired affair. 

Again, all this is instructive. To see how radically a work can be interpreted is, of course, done with plays and adaptations across the board; but it’s rare to find an instance of a work that was so translated over a period of time (in this case, a decade) from one of the classics of detective fiction to a pretty decent movie to a pretty messed-up flick to a work of art. And it is (mostly) the same story and much the same dialog throughout.

It goes without saying that John Huston is a great director, but Roy del Ruth was no slouch and Dieterle has his share of classic films under his belt. So what happened?

I suspect budget had something to do with it, as well as just how compelling was the name “Dashiell Hammett” in selling tickets. But even so, the casts of both earlier films were not unknowns nor were they untried or unskilled thespians. “The Thin Man” hadn’t come out yet; it would be three years after the first “Maltese Falcon” before Hammeett’s dialog crackled as it was meant to and that might explain something about the second film.

“Satan Met a Lady” may have been an attempt to marry screwball comedy with the Hammett reputation for sophistication a la Nick and Nora Charles but this misreads the source material and dooms the production to incomprehensibility. Bette Davis saw the issue right away and wanted to walk (she eventually did and was suspended by Warners, left for London, returned, and was punished with an even worse movie; that’s okay, she got her due eventually). Upon reflection, in an alternative universe, she could have played Brigid O’Shaughnessy as well as Astor. 

All of this said, I recommend viewing different versions of the same story as a way of understanding how very often, the success or failure of a given narrative hinges on a number of points. It might be the director’s choices, it might be in the script, and it might be the cast. Films are collaborative efforts and no one really knows what they’re getting until the release date. It is eye-opening to see how one director’s take emphasizes one element or set of elements and another director may run with something else. 

Typically, I’m loath to say out of hand that this or that version is better or worse than another (Murnau’s “Nosferatu” and Herzog’s later reading come to mind), but in a case like these films just discussed, I think the variation in quality is fairly definitive.

Having gone down this road now, I feel like I owe it to myself to go watch, for the umpteenth time, John Huston’s opus. And maybe even reread the novel. Nothing like going back to the beginning.