***Out In The Be-bop 1930s Crime Noir Night- Dashiell Hammett’s Ur-Ur Maltese Falcon-“Satan Met A Lady-A Film Review

Click below to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1936 film version of the classic Dashiell Hammett crime novel The Maltese Falcon renamed Satan Met A Lady.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan_Met_a_Lady

DVD Review

Satan Met A Lady, starring Bette Davis, Warner Brothers, 1936Recently in reviewing the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon (starring Bebe Daniels and Richard Cortez) I noted that it was possible for even a devoted actor Humphrey Bogart and crime novelist Dashiell Hammett aficionado to learn something new. For many years I had assumed that the 1941 hard-nosed Bogie as Sam Spade version of The Maltese Falcon was the original screen version of Hammett’s crime noir classic. Then an acquaintance, the old time radical journalist Josh Breslin whose by-line for half the progressive press and alternate vision journals in this country for the past forty years that some readers may know, informed me that an older version (or rather, versions, existed). That initial discovery however had to go unchecked until the age of the Internet where I found the original 1931 version. And now I have found another film version via a very helpful lead from Wikipedia the film under review, Satan Met A Lady.

Of course after reading Hammett’s crime novel countless times (if for no other reason than that great dialogue even after the plot line wore thin) and viewing the 1941 Bogie version almost as many times certain personal prejudices were bound to show up. The key was the role of Sam Spade as the world- weary scrappy avenger of his partner’s murder while “in the line of duty”. If for no other reason than for professional pride. And the well-known plot line, basically murder and mayhem by parties known and unknown searching for a bird (here a ram’s horn), “the stuff of dreams,” is what let’s Sam save the day, his professional pride, and his rough-hewn sense of justice.

This 1936 version, despite its familiar story line, is a failed experiment, despite Bette Davis’s talent (she of the Bette Davis eyes). This faux Spade is less concerned with those gritty issues, more brazenly cynical, and much more of a womanizer than Bogie’s Spade (although Bogie was not immune, temporarily at least, to femme fatale charms). This one is played for laughs, for camp and for, well who knows what else. In the 1931 version it is clear, very clear, why Spade is ready to chase after windmills for the femme fatale (played there by Bebe Daniels). Sexual tension and adventure were rife. In the 1941 clearer version I was always wondering what there was about Mary Astor (after all she didn’t seem Bogie’s type on the face of it) that made him all that intrepid. It was never spelled out. This one does nobody justice, sexual innuendo or not. No question though, despite these new discoveries, that Bogie’s Spade is the cinematic standard and I think Hammett would agree.