When The World Lived For Film Noir Heaven-With The Film Adaptation Of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” In Mind

By Phil Larkin and Kenny Jacobs

[Ever since I came on board on this site as site manager first taking over the day to day operations, handing out assignments, editing, researching that sort of thing and then when Allan Jackson retired the whole operation I have tried to do some innovations both in the way the work was assigned and how it was presented.*There was a rough period of some serious internal struggle between the old guard who had hung on Jackson’s every word and received whatever assignments they liked many times taking whatever struck their collective fancies and submitting to be automatically rubber-stamped by Jackson and the guys who have come to be known in urban legend around the office water cooler as the “Young Turks” who had to take the old guard’s leavings-or else.

Frankly as a result of what I would call nepotism, there is no other word for it although Allan claimed it was impossible since that term only dealt with feathering family nests, all the plum assignments were reserved for those whom he had grown up with him in the old working-class of North Adamsville or had met on the highways during the turbulent 1960s beginning with the well-known Summer of Love, 1967 centered in San Francisco. That hard fact true even when of necessity due to retirements and tiredness he had to bring in a cohort of younger writers who wound up mostly doing rehash jobs on what the old guard left behind. Not a good situation which in the end was the undoing of Jackson since the self-styled “Young Turks” rose up to smite the dragon and he left packing his bags for parts unknown vowing revenge unto to the seventh generation. More importantly, leaving me to try to pick up some pieces.

The first of which was to cut way down, cut down to nothing in the end on the proliferation of titles hanging on each and every writer. After an unsuccessful trial run as describing everybody as self-evident “writer” we have gone to simple given and surnames in the by-line line. The second, to be kind to myself, we are still trying to work out, by having both young and older writers write out of their comfort zones. If you wrote about old time films, which was fine by me coming over from the American Film Gazette where we did a million of those, then try your hand at more modern stuff. That is where as they say “the rubber hit the road.” Where there was almost another civil war here headed on their respective sides by the two writers who will do the review below.

In order to placate both parties who wanted to do this fantastic review of one the super-classic all-time great movies I decided to have both give their takes on the film and together glean the high points through mutual rebuttals. Kenny, having done that kind of thing at his last job agreed without a fight. Phil reared up on his high horse and bucked me every minute until I threatened to put him back on probation which would have meant “doing penance” writing about some zombie film, or worse having to do some television series reviews. Needless to say he saw the light of reason after that. So below is the experiment in its first glow with each take first and then some play by play. Greg Green     

*There has been a persistent undercurrent around the shop about what actually happened to Allan Jackson in the internal dispute. That situation got a big push by both sides when Allan wound up in Utah doing stringer work for some Mormon publications. The old guard called it a purge, an exile, thinking that this little hiccup was on the order of the Stalin-Trotsky fight during the Russian Revolution period since most of them, along with Allan, had been at least around the fringes of serious leftist groups in their youth after they shed their Summer of Love dope-addled goggles. The “Young Turks” a little more vicious having had to hold fire under the Jackson regime or they would have been in Utah or North Dakota themselves also called it openly a purge. Were glad once the old goat was gone to revel in their victory.

The truth? Remember I was the distinct beneficiary of his demise. Allan would not have retired, no way, and I had many talks with him about it before the hammer came down on his poor misunderstanding head, unless he had been voted out by the coterie of writers, including the vote, the decisive one, of his oldest friend Sam Lowell who said it was time to “pass the torch.” In Sam’s words “nobody under about sixty gave a fuck about all the bright shining stuff that the 1960s was supposed to represent before it all turned to dross.” So maybe it was a purge but a soft-core one if you think about the matter. ]           

Phil Larkin’s The Maltese Falcon take:

Forget all the bullshit about crime doesn’t pay that always comes with the package in these kinds of films whether it is the 1940s or now (hell the “crime doesn’t pay” gag goes all the way back to the Garden, back to Adam forcing Eve to grab the brass ring, a no-no, and maybe even before that). Forget too all the nonsense about a guy, a guy in the low-life key-hole peeper private detective racket upholding the honor of the profession, Jesus, profession he called it, and having to move heaven and earth to find the nasty killer of his partner. That is strictly for the sob sisters and terminal flick junkies like the so-called protagonist Sam Spade could have given a fuck about old Miles when he was playing footsie with Miles’ wife and had his name stricken from the world about two seconds after he dropped by the office and had his Girl Friday do the deed after Miles has taken a couple of well-earned slugs for being skirt-crazy. Forget too writing off Brigid or whatever her name really was and once you get into the high-end alias racket to cover your tracks as long as you have enough well-doctored passports names don’t matter as some gun-simple dame. That won’t wash either. 

This one is strictly about a girl (a woman nowadays okay) having to do what a girl had to do in a time when women had many fewer options, for good or evil. See I know the back story, I know what the post-Code Hollywood censors would not let the 1940s world know about and even Dashiell Hammett, no prude, fudged on it too. This Brigid, let’s go with that name since that is the name that she went to the big-step off under, and maybe under the seven veils that was her real name, had been in Hong Kong a high priced whore, call girl they call them now, maybe then too, at Madame Chiang’s bordello which serviced frisky British senior civil servants and wired Chinese mandarins tired of their wives with every kind of pleasure they desired. (This Madame Chiang if you know your history was the older sister of the infamous Madame Chiang kai-shek, wife of the powerful Nationalist Chinese leader of the time how else do you thing she was able to get the dough to go to Wellesley College.) The problem, always a problem with fickle men was that the good old boys either got tired of her, she faded like all things do, or both. When the Fat Man and crew came storming into Hong Kong on a lead about the fabulous jeweled bird they were seeking out of Istanbul she joined up with his crowd once she showed him and his gunsel then, Thursby, around the world. (It must have been tough going even for a seasoned pro like Brigid to deal with that Fat Man’s girth.)         

Now you can see things fall into place. Using her still powerful feminine wiles on that Fat Man crew (except Joel Cairo who being what they would have called then if they dared on screen “light on his feet,” a sissy, would be impervious to her charms) and half the guys in port like sucker bait Captain Jacoby who actually wound up getting the bird out even if he paid for it with a few slugs in the mix. (Not from her although at trial the less than chivalrous Sam Spade trying to suck up to the D.A. and get out of his own legal troubles by trying to tie her into every unsolved murder from Hong Kong to Frisco Bay.)

Brigid’s winding up at the good offices of Miles Archer and Sam Spade made perfect sense. Just some more man bait. By the way, here’s another back story tidbit, Brigid never was referred to the pair at her hotel but once she figured out her plan, as far as she could figure such things in advance, she had picked the name out of a telephone directory. Archer came up first. If somebody named Abbott say had been the first name he would have been sitting six feet under now instead of jerkwater Miles.  

              

She played the sullen, slightly soiled (quaint term for a fallen woman, yes) damsel in distress to Sam perfectly. Played him like a yo-yo once she got him in heat. Made him buy the Archer story, the Thursby story, and best of all until she saw he had his limits of use to her the Fat Man story. Would have seduced the impervious Joel Cairo someway if it had suited her purposes, lavender boy and all. A smart private detective, if there is such an animal whose main joy in life is peeping through keyholes and drinking shoddy whiskey from the bottle at the bottom of their desk drawers, would have walked away once they knew about this Thursby character, about his putting newspaper around his bed so nobody could sneak up on him. Jesus, no amount of trips around the world with the experienced Brigid working her skills was worth tangling up with these bad characters.     

The rest of the play was a piece of cake. Play him off and on against the Fat Man and if things got dicey let the Fat Man’s gunsel put a few slugs in Sam’s ear. Hell if he got rough then she might have to do the rooty-toot-toot herself. Here’s where the play fouled up and it wasn’t really her fault in the end although she would step off for the whole thing anyway. That fucking hyped-up bird, that Maltese Falcon, was a fake, the dingus was nothing, not real nothing but blacken enamel. Seeing that there was no dough from any source Sam cut bait, cut up his honey and seeing he was built to be the fall guy if he didn’t pass the blame off sent her over. This is where the faded beauty Brigid part comes in. Maybe if she had been about ten years younger, and about fifty years less of a whore she could have coaxed him into running away with her. No dice. Here’s another little back story tidbit they didn’t tell you in the movie tough guy hard-boiled detective Sam Spade after she was gone spent many a cold winter night wishing he had run away with her. Yeah, the stuff of dreams works in funny ways. Still a girl has got to do what a girl has got to do.       

Kenny Jacobs’ take:

I had better admit that I know already through conversations with Phil Larkin and what I could figure would be his take on this film given his inclinations that he would hone in on the relatively minor figure of Brigid. I agree with everybody who has reviewed this movie over the past seventy-five years that there are serious questions about whether her real name was Brigid O’Shaughnessy  but we will go with that name as good as any others and as a few commentators have noted when the Frisco coppers finally put the 

cuffs on her after Sam Spade was forced to send her over to save his own neck that was the name she gave on the police blotter. And the name she took the big step-off under. So much for what dreams are made of which had the coppers scratching their heads in bewilderment when Sam said that remark going down that long elevator run. They were always behind the curve on the case anyway, had already deposited Miles Archer’s, Thursby’ and Captain Jacobi’s deaths in the cold files and would only resurrect them when they decided to clean the slate of half a dozen cases and lay them at Brigid’s doorstep since she was already going to take the big step-off for Archer’s murder anyway. But enough of that little dimwitted gun simple mantrap because when the deal went down the one really pulling the strings was Caspar Gutman, the “Fat Man.”

Figure it out for yourself. Brigid-down for the count. The cheapjack gunsel, Wilmar, Gutman hired down in a shootout with the coppers as he was trying to take the Oakland ferry. Joel Cairo face down in Frisco bay after a night with some rough trade Jean Genet types down along the waterfront. Hell they even tried to take Sam’s ticket but his quick-witted lawyer made short work of that attempt and although it cost him a few bucks they both had a good laugh this second time the tried to pull that license crap. They never caught up to the Fat Man and who knows he might have grabbed the goddam bird after all. But mainly he got away and that says a lot about the whole caper.  

Look at it this way who else could have masterminded the whole operation. Yeah so you see it had to be the Fat Man. Here’s the back story which will surprise everybody who thought Brigid just stumbled into the low rent back alley building the Archer& Spade operation ran out of along with repo men, con artists, disbarred lawyers, unlicensed dentists and swift insurance jobbers. And don’t believe that bullshit about Brigid picking the name out of some vagrant telephone book. She, whatever her sexual charms and skills,   wasn’t bright enough for that heavy a task. Gutman had checked around with local guys he knew from the international cartel he was fronting for and Archer & Spade came out number one on the “from hunger” list. Once the Fat Man dangled Brigid in front of either man, once they got a whiff of that gardenia fragrance and dreams of silky sheets the game was on. Sending “light on his feet” Joel Cairo to back Brigid up, to make the whole thing look like a tong war, make it look like it was everybody against everybody else in the scramble for the fucking black falcon. Brilliant.           

But that was not the end of the Fat Man’s magic once it turned out Sam Spade was the one left standing once Brigid blew Archer’s brains out so the gunsel could take down Thursby when it looked like he was trying to front Brigid to cut his own deal. He has Brigid lure Sam into his spider-web, they meet and the Fat Man promises Sam the world. Sam bites, bites big time figuring with his share that he would be able to keep Brigid for himself, keep her off the street corner tricks which is where she was heading. That of course before he found out that Brigid after about fifty “heartfelt” denials had lied to him about killing Miles. And before the freaking dingus turned out to be as fake as Gutman’s idea of cutting Sam in for some serious change and he needed someone to take the fall. Hell, the Fat Man might have been carrying too many extra pounds for his own good but he moved swiftly enough when danger lurked. Not a scratch or a breeze on him. Nice work Caspar.        

*********

Phil Larkin’s rebuttal:

As Greg Green, our esteemed site manager and social media guru, mentioned above in his introduction I went kicking and screaming into this so-called dual review with the young kid Kenny Jacobs. I have never shared a review in my life, the damn idea seems like an oxymoron or something. Some silly idea like this was to be some Siskel and Ebert gab fest in cyberspace. WTF. I hope this little so-called experiment will be the last one I have to wade through. Now Kenny as I have found out in not a bad guy, writes some pretty good stuff about zombies and super-hero comic book kiddie stuff that nobody under the age of thirty will read but he is totally out of his depth in struggling to figure out what the hell is going on in a simple private detective greed and glory flic like The Maltese Falcon. I won’t belabor the point but his so-called credentials for this review, which Greg Green must have been drunk to let go by, was that he had film noir in his DNA because his parents had taken him to a million film festival retrospectives when he was a kid of about eight. As against my well-known connoisseurship of this beloved genre since my own lonesome travel youth cadging many a Saturday afternoon matinee double-feature at the old now long gone Strand Theater in the town I grew up in.               

If you have read this far then you know that Mr. Jacobs and I have very different “takes” as Greg Green is fond of calling them. What I question is whether he actually saw this movie or had, like a lot of the other younger writers here, just cribbed from a summary on Wikipedia. Or maybe he is remembering back to when his parents took him to see this film when he was eight and he got scared by the big fat guy who was giving Sam Spade a hard time because no way in God’s good green earth is Caspar Gutman, the Fat Man the person pulling the strings on this one. Hell he had trouble enough just walking across the room never mind trying to get his greedy big hand on a precious stone bird.          

The only thing I believe we agree on is that Sam Spade is just a foil, some jabbering for the real action and that somebody else was pulling the strings. Hell Brigid, dear sweet Brigid, bless her little whorish heart had this one down from scene one. Kenny claims, erroneously, probably based on information from Wikipedia that the Fat Man through his international cartel connections, mainly a bunch of guys working for an Armenian rug merchant who desperately wanted that black bird for his mistress once she had read the story in some historical novel by Sir Walter Scott about what had happened to the dingus before it ever got to Spain, had gathered the information for Brigid to run over the back alley office of Archer &Spade for some local manpower. Yes, the Fat Man fronted the dough and all for the operation I will not deny that but the real record shows, what Brigid herself told the coppers when she was trying to get out from under taking the big step-off for the murder of Miles Archer, was that she had picked their names out of the telephone book. You hardly need to pull in half the criminal world to do that soft task.        

What Kenny missed, consciously missed as far as I can see, is that Brigid’s connections with the Fat Man were tangential, she was running her own operation from the time she met the Fat Man in Madame Chiang’s brothel in Hong King and he confided his tall tale story to her. Once she saw his entourage she saw easy pickings, some flaming sissy, Cairo, as we called gay guys in the old neighborhood when we didn’t call them fags, a bent gunsel Thursby who thought so much of the Fat Man that after about two minutes in Hong Kong he sided with Brigid and another hired gun, Willmar who some crippled newspaper boy had been able to steal his guns without batting an eyelash. The gang that couldn’t shoot straight as the late New York City columnist Jimmy Breslin used to say. So all she needed to do was grab some local Frisco muscle, it didn’t matter if it was Archer or Spade or if the first name in the directory was Abbott whom she took around the world since once she got her claws in either would be putty in her hands although she claimed she would have personally favored the more handsome Archer to the “runt” Spade but the coppers dismissed that as so much bad blood once Sam stopped doing her bidding. Once he sent her over to save his own gutless neck after the bird proved to be a fake which some Greek merchant in Istanbul had fobbed off on some other guy before the Fat Man and then Brigid got their hands on it. Her big mistake and an easy one to commit once you believed the reason for covering the bird in black paint was not having it evaluated in Hong Kong before she left. (Little did she know that the “fake” had been a set-up by that Greek merchant who would eventually sell the real one to that Armenian rug merchant which did the trick to get that mistress to start doing tricks out of the Kama Sutra he kept begging her to do.)            

(As if to put paid to Kenny’s bogus take the Fat Man did not fade into the woodwork although he did get away from San Francisco easily enough once he shed Willmar to the sharks. He wound up in Amsterdam where the old Interpol grabbed him on an international warrant but would eventually let him go once San Francisco decided to clean up its cold case load and pin everything Brigid. It turned out he was related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and so wound up back in England living on Baker Street somewhere.)

Kenny Jacob’s rebuttal:

I agree with my esteemed if edging toward senility fellow writer Phil Larkin that Sam Spade, hell even Miles Archer if things had turned out that way, was nothing but trimming, a fall guy, extra baggage on the real action that was happening that he was clueless about until the end. Or almost the end when he found out the dingus was a fake and that it was either he or Brigid who was going to take the fall and he, having lost in the “stuff of dreams” derby sent her over to his buddies the coppers who really wanted his hide. But Phil must have been smoking that wacky weed, that dope you can on some days smell around the office when some of the older guys having a flashback to that Summer of Love, 1967 they have been going on and on about ever since I arrived here in early 2017 decide to go to nostalgia land. (Greg is not happy about the dope during working hours but is unsure what to do about it since “precedent” from Allan Jackson’s time was the place was some opium den or something.)     

Yeah Phil most definitely is on something if he thinks that the little what does he call the women, oh yeah, the frill Brigid was running the operation to grab the black falcon. Christ I don’t even think she would know what a telephone directory was if pressed never mind actually picking some name starting with the letter “A.” And if Phil wasn’t high as a kite when he came up with the “idea” that Brigid was running the show then the only other reason she came into his head was that Phil is a notorious skirt-chaser. Has regaled me with stories from his youth thinking that I was one of his good old boys.  I have seen him in action when Josh Breslin’s old flame, Leslie Dumont, who now courtesy of Greg has a by-line something she never had with Allan as long as he had known her, is around and you can see that the stars and moon single-handedly revolve around women.       

Yeah, no way is some little whore like Brigid, even if she was once a high-priced call girl, a treat in white women-starved Hong Kong, had the dough to run such an enterprise. She was strictly bait for either Archer or Spade, whoever grabbed her first for the Fat Man      

who knew exactly who he was latching her onto from his local sources. Two, take your pick, guys from hunger, working out of some back alley building with repo men and failed dentists, as skirt crazy as Phil. (Archer licked his chops when he first saw her even though he was married and Sam was having a torrid affair with his wife right under his nose so let’s not dismiss that skirt-crazy idea out of hand Phil.

Look at the play though. Brigid down to her last few hundred, having to hock her furs when Sam needed dough, led Sam by the nose not to some operation of her own but to the Fat Man once she knew he was in town. Every action she took from leading Sam to the Fat Man to begging Sam to let her get away with Archer’s murder once the caper was heading in the wrong direction  let’s anybody, let’s everybody, private detective or not, know that she was just a cog in the wheel, a mantrap and nothing else. The final proof although Phil will probably deny it is nobody did a damn thing to spring her once Sam sent her over. Yeah, she took the big step-off alone. And like Phil said the Fat Man eventually walked. As Sam Spade had nothing to do with it-“case closed.”