Directed by: Roy Del Ruth
Starring: Bebe Daniels, Ricardo Cortez, Dudley Digges
So my friend is writing a paper on film noir movies, and he mentioned that he compared the classic 1941 Humphrey Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon with this earlier one, made before the Hayes Code was put into place. It sounded like an interesting experiment to me, so I decided to recreate it. What he failed to mention, however, was that this 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon is FUCKING AWFUL. THANKS, JERKO.
Sam Spade is a private detective who gets caught up in some foreign intrigue regarding a statuette of a falcon, which is apparently made of gold and fantastic jewels, but which has been covered up to look normal and black. Yeah, I believe that story. Spade gets his hands on the bird and tries to make a deal with The Fat Man and his assistants, as well as the hot dame who hired him in the first place, and oh yeah, the cops who think he killed a couple people. Can he pull it off? He’s fucking Hum– wait, he’s not Humphrey Bogart, he’s some dick who reads lines like he were reading out of the phone book. But he somehow manages to win out in the end anyway.
Yeah, I know, the 30’s and before were a completely different time in the making of movies, and in particular sound film was still kinda being figured out. Still, the acting in this movie is fucking atrocious, and I don’t think it’s just because I watched a version of the same film with significantly better actors in it right beforehand. Okay, maybe that is part of it, but the point stands that these people are awful. Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade is just hard to watch, and his only emotional states seem to be complete indifference or wide-eyed baby-eating mania, and frankly he’s fucking scary as a lead character. Still, there are some neat differences to the approach towards sex and violence between the two versions. It’s really not worth seeing at all for the average viewer, however.
Films in Boxes 
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