Posted in: by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Directors, Film Noir, Film Reviews, John Huston

Out of the Past: The Maltese Falcon

[Originally published in Movietone News 26, October 1973]

The Maltese Falcon showed up in the area recently, for the hundredth time. Hohum? Far from it! Let there be a hundred more! Huston’s first film set the standard for his later work, a standard of excellence that has rarely been matched by his more recent films. In The Maltese Falcon Huston was already developing the pattern that would characterize his finest films: the introduction of an intrigue-suspense plot that’s soon completely subordinated to characterization. In films like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen and The Kremlin Letter, we become so taken with the characters, the human truths they represent, and the stylish manner in which they are portrayed, that the actual plot line becomes insignificant; and if the Maltese Falcon or the Kremlin letter should prove to have been red herrings all along, it matters not a whit.

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Posted in: by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Essays

Remakes that earn their keep

Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld in the 2010 ‘True Grit’

Some time ago, word went out in the land that Ethan Coen and Joel Coen would undertake a new version of True Grit. The brothers deemed the 1968 Charles Portis novel a great book and felt that many of its riches remained untapped by the 1969 film version. With No Country for Old Men as proof that the Coens know how to bring an estimable novel to the screen, we’re salivating to see their film. But why did some people start trashing the first True Grit movie as soon as they heard a new one was coming?

The first True Grit was an abundantly good film—and in 1969 its Old Hollywood classicism held its own alongside Sam Peckinpah’s radical, breakout work on The Wild Bunch. Why should it be a problem if we end up with two fine movies entitled True Grit, each with its own particular virtues? Instead, too often, we fall into the insidious pattern of talking about remakes—indeed, movies in general—as if it were a zero-sum game. Only one can survive. I like this movie, so let’s beat up on the other one until it gives up the title—literally. That’s just silly.

So saddle up old Bo—or Little Blackie, as the case may be—and ride the remake trail looking for multiple versions that are anything but redundant. There are quite a few, and some of them may surprise you.

***

We begin with a remake that got named best picture of its year—although Warner Bros. didn’t go out of their way to mention that Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) was based on an ultracrisp Hong Kong movie, Infernal Affairs (2002), which had revivified the played-out HK gangster genre. Both films tell the parallel, occasionally intersecting stories of two police detectives leading double lives: one (Andy Lau/Matt Damon) as a police department mole planted by a mob leader (Eric Tsang/Jack Nicholson), the other (Tony Leung Chiu Wai/Leonardo DiCaprio) as a longtime deep-cover operative posing as the mob leader’s righthand man. Some admirers prefer the Hong Kong movie, directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak from a script by Alan Mak and Felix Chong, for telling its twisty tale in a whirlwind hour-and-40-minutes, whereas Scorsese took two-and-a-half hours. But Scorsese’s epic savors the history of the mob boss, the moles, and their (South Boston) community more deeply and is richer in atmosphere. It also offers a hogfeast of character-acting opportunities for Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg, Ray Winstone, et al., and arias of finely florid dialogue by William Monahan. Best of all, it has Vera Farmiga, mesmerizing as the police shrink who becomes the lover of both secret agents. And at the very least, its success freed us of the ritual obligation to bemoan, year after year, that Martin Scorsese had never won an Oscar.

***

In 1928 Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur scored a huge hit with their play The Front Page, about a Machiavellian newspaper editor scheming to keep his star reporter, Hildy Johnson, from quitting to get married. A 1931 film version followed, directed by two-time Academy Award winner Lewis Milestone—a respectable effort, though Milestone’s early-talkie experimentation would not age well. Fade in eight years later to a Hollywood livingroom where director Howard Hawks “was trying to prove to somebody that The Front Page had the best dialogue of any modern play.” As it chanced, a woman read Hildy’s lines that evening and inspiration struck. Within weeks Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer were preparing His Girl Friday (1940), a gender-bending adaptation that turned Hildy Johnson from Hildebrand to Hildegarde and made her the editor’s ex-wife, looking to remarry. The sex change did no damage to the original concept (fact is, it lowered the creepiness quotient of Walter’s boys’-club possessiveness), and Hawks was further inspired to appropriate some brilliant comedy-of-divorce material—including a certain supporting actor—from Leo McCarey’s 1937 gem The Awful Truth. That film’s star, Cary Grant, plays editor Walter Burns, and Rosalind Russell as Hildy matches him in hurtling energy, flawless timing, and mastery at overlapping dialogue in the trademark Hawksian manner. Add expert ensemble work by the character actors in the criminal courts pressroom gang and you’ve got a peerless comedy guaranteed to leave you both exhausted and exhilarated.

***

It took three tries to get The Maltese Falcon right. The Dashiell Hammett novel came out in 1930. Warner Bros. bought the rights and in 1931 made a not-bad movie, notable today for its Pre-Code frankness and the sleaziness of private eye Sam Spade as portrayed by Ricardo Cortez. In 1936 the studio recycled their property as Satan Met a Lady (1936), a ludicrous farrago that didn’t credit the source novel by name, changed Sam Spade to Ted Shane (an inanely grinning Warren William), and made Kasper Gutman, “the fat man,” a woman. Another five years passed. Then John Huston selected Falcon for his directorial debut. As the fair-haired boy among Warner screenwriters, Huston knew the book was readymade movie material with world-class dialogue; previous versions just hadn’t taken advantage of that. The studio almost blew it by assigning George Raft to star, but Raft passed and the role of Sam Spade went to Humphrey Bogart, whose legend had begun to take form a few months earlier in the Huston-scripted High Sierra (1941). The rightest cast in Hollywood history fell into place around him—Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr.—and Huston designed the most intricate camera strategy he would ever employ. The result was (somebody told you?) a masterpiece, the definitive private-eye mystery, a riveting duel of wits among a cast of vivid characters, and an early waft of what would eventually be identified as film noir.

***

Sometimes the original version is easy to transcend. Ocean’s Eleven (1960) was the first “Rat Pack” movie, which is to say, the first movie conceived and built for Frank Sinatra and his best showbiz chums to inhabit and trash like a rock star’s hotel room. It also began a streak of trashing, or at least besmirching, the reputations of some worthy directors—in this case, Lewis Milestone, who soon found that direction was neither wanted nor listened to. A caper movie, Ocean’s Eleven had veterans of the 82nd Airborne conspiring to rob Las Vegas casinos. The caper part is endurable; the run-up to it, an endless slog of bad wisecracks and unrelieved male-chauvinist-piggery, is not. Still, that notion of taking down five Vegas casinos during an ingeniously engineered blackout kept audiences interested. Forty years later, director Steven Soderbergh, hot off dual Oscar nominations for Erin Brockovich and Traffic, decided to revisit it. With pal and producing partner George Clooney as ringleader Danny Ocean, a cadre of co-conspirators including Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and a sublime Carl Reiner and Elliott Gould, and Julia Roberts (the former Erin Brockovich) as Ocean’s ex-wife, the party was on. This time it was a good one. However, as much fun as the 2001 Ocean’s Eleven delivered, it should never have birthed a franchise. Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen were almost, though not quite, as intolerably smug as the Rat Pack effort.

***

The Departed aside, the practice of remaking foreign-language films for the multiplex is mostly parasitic and often offensive. And when the foreign film is as singular, surprising, and unexpectedly fine as Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008), the idea of plunking the story down in America and finding a horror-genre designated hitter to direct it sets one’s blood a-boil. So imagine the shock and gratitude upon discovering that Matt Reeves has honored everything that made the Swedish masterpiece so extraordinary and moving, translated it directly when he could, and brought his own intelligent and discreet perspective to whatever needed adding or adapting. Let Me In (2010), like its predecessor, is a vampire movie so subtle that one hates having to mention it’s a vampire movie. The main characters are two twelve-year-old outcasts who find each other in a snowy residential courtyard … although one of them has been twelve for many lifetimes. There’s nothing gratuitous about the several gory deaths in the film, and the monster is heartbreakingly human in every way but one. This American version of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s story takes place in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where (who knew?) it snows just as in Sweden. The juxtaposition of gothic horror and crisp mountain horizons delivers aesthetic satisfaction, as does the resetting of the story in a culture where vehicular traffic is an insistent fact of life. Let Me In is new again, though its wisdom is ancient.

***

After dismissive reviews in 1955, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows went on to become the most widely admired of the director’s elegant melodramas of the Fifties. Its plot concerns a handsome widow (Jane Wyman) in a small New England town who falls in love with a younger man (Rock Hudson), her gardener. Her grown children and her friends disapprove, to the extent that she breaks off the relationship and accepts the prospect of a lonely old age. Then she realizes how lonely that’s going to be and … well, you should see it for yourself. All That Heaven Allows has been remade twice, though in both cases it’s more a matter of homage: a postmodern filmmaker expecting viewers to recognize his film as an alternate version and have their experience deepened by the additional frame he’s thrown around the original. Of course, Sirk’s original was already frame-filled; his lucid, analytical visual style was key to investing potentially mawkish material with complexity, intelligence, and power. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Sirk tribute, Ali—Fear Eats the Soul (1974), deals with the unlikely but tender love between an elderly German charwoman (Brigitte Mira) and a Moroccan “guest worker” (El Hedi ben Salem). Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (2002) sets its tale where Sirk did, in a picturesque Fifties New England. Its heroine (Julianne Moore) is not widowed but married to a man (Dennis Quaid) who’s secretly homosexual, and this time the sympathetic gardener is black (Dennis Haysbert).

***

Some remakes enjoy such stature that we may never suspect they’re remakes at all. My Darling Clementine (1946) is among the best-loved of John Ford’s classic Westerns, a historically inaccurate yet exquisitely imagined retelling of Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. No one ever forgets Henry Fonda’s Wyatt leaning back in his chair on the hotel porch; or the chilling malevolence of Walter Brennan’s Old Man Clanton; or the surgery performed on a saloon table with only a handheld kerosene lamp for light; or the showdown at O.K. Corral, the brusque popping of gunshots amid cloaking dust as the morning stagecoach rattles by. Above all, there is the poem of Sunday morning in Tombstone, the slow, auspicious gathering of the citizenry to flow toward an unbuilt church, and a worship service whose text will be music and dancing. Clementine is a film of breathtaking beauty and loving grace notes, yet on another level the production was a convenient way for Ford to fulfill a studio contract. 20th Century–Fox head Darryl Zanuck suggested remaking Frontier Marshal, a sturdy 1939 Fox B-movie in which Randolph Scott had played Earp opposite Cesar Romero’s Doc Holliday. Although barely more than an hour long and downright abrupt in its climax, that movie includes prototypes of key scenes in Clementine. Director Allan Dwan started in the picture business before Ford, and his camera eye is nearly as attentive to the surrounding Tombstone community as Ford’s would be.

***

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was one of the movies that nailed the Fifties. A small-town doctor (the late Kevin McCarthy) comes to realize that everyone in his community is being replaced by alien, soulless lookalikes. Was this sci-fi story an allegory of Cold War paranoia (“Commies are everywhere and they’re taking over!”) or a cry of protest against an age of conformity? To which the correct answer is: Yes. Daniel Mainwaring adapted the novel by Jack Finney; Don Siegel, who was on a roll at the time, directed. Then and now, an absolutely terrific movie. So who needed another version in 1978? Well, maybe people who’d noticed that the “Me generation” thing was getting out of hand. Director Philip Kaufman and screenwriter W.D. Richter set their adaptation in supertrendy San Francisco and delivered not only the creepy-suspenseful goods but also a witty detailing of how gratification seekers keep bouncing off one another’s lives like misspent spermatozoa while pursuing insular notions of contentment. In the hero’s best friend part, Jeff Goldblum created a zany, maddening, touching portrait of an insufficiently gifted narcissist compensating for neglect, and Leonard Nimoy was perfect casting as the celebrity psychiatrist and bestselling self-help author whose patients can truly say, “You’ve changed my life!” Donald Sutherland starred; Don Siegel and Kevin McCarthy did cameos. There have been two subsequent remakes: Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993), full-on nightmarish but uneven; and the quite superfluous The Invasion (2007).

***

By 2006 the James Bond franchise had been running on empty for so long that it was hard to muster curiosity about the new Double-O Seven, Daniel Craig. That changed utterly about five minutes into Casino Royale. Blond hair notwithstanding, this Craig person was a darker Bond than we’d ever thought to see—darker even than Sean Connery’s, because Connery had that twinkle. Craig brought a nervy, wounded gravitas to the part, potent enough to cue us to take Bond’s preposterous missions seriously. Turns out the new one mattered more than any since From Russia With Love (1963). Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, had been adapted twice before: there was an hourlong live-TV drama in 1954 (Barry Nelson—Barry Nelson?!—was Bond; Peter Lorre, Le Chiffre), and in 1967 independent producer Charles K. Feldman had made a multi-director, big-screen mess of it with three different James Bonds (David Niven, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen). So that’s why the 2006 Casino Royale counts as a remake, even if it’s the only screen version that matters. Martin Campbell directed with both panache and care, and instead of the usual silly Bond gadgetry, the key technology was real-world: a Smart Phone! Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre was a credibly dangerous, rather than cartoonish, villain, and Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd became the first Bond woman of emotional consequence since Diana Rigg’s Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

***

James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007) can be deemed a successful remake; it made money, got some good reviews, apparently satisfied a lot of people. Yet it’s a textbook example of how to vulgarize a classic. Delmer Daves’s 1957 original wasn’t quite a great Western, but it was awfully good. Van Heflin played a small-time rancher who’s about to lose his place, and Glenn Ford was the captured bandit he’s deputized to escort to prison. The film is principally a character study, with the charming but lethal badman tempting the unheroic family man to take a bribe, let him escape, and go home safe. Inconveniently for the badman, he starts to admire his captor. The original 3:10 to Yuma, from a short story by Elmore Leonard, was as lean and spare as its drought-season black and white cinematography. Spare, too, in the matter of killings: only four or five (one is ambiguous). Mangold kills off ten times that many, even importing a Gatling gun at one point to increase the firepower, and most of the deaths are gratuitous. Oddly enough, he overcompensates by loading down Russell Crowe’s outlaw and Christian Bale’s rancher with enough backstory and motivations to break a horse’s spine. Crowe and Bale are fine—Crowe especially, giving his bloody badman an artist’s touch—and Ben Foster is memorably ornate as Crowe’s kill-happy lieutenant. To Mangold’s credit, he doesn’t go hipster on the genre, twist the conventions with cheap irony. That’s something. But the original version is really something.

Copyright 2013 Richard T. Jameson

Posted in: Actors, by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Essays

Elisha Cook

Elisha Cook Jr. in "The Maltese Falcon": an indespensible man
Elisha Cook Jr. in “The Maltese Falcon”: an indispensable man

I posted the piece on The Maltese Falcon last week. Today I rewatched a few minutes of They Won’t Forget and thought, let’s have a little remembrance for an indispensable man. This was written as an obit fifteen years ago.

If they gave career Oscars to character actors, nobody would have had a better claim to one than Elisha Cook Jr. Character actors were the life-blood of the classical American cinema, and there were dozens of redoubtable players whom audiences never knew by name but still took pleasure in reencountering – “There’s that guy again, he’s always good” – as they filled up the sides and backgrounds of scenes, the spaces between the stars, contributing a vital, credibility-enhancing texture that contemporary films largely lack. Cook was one of the few members of the breed that moviegoers learned to greet by name. And the “he’s always good” definitely applied.

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Posted in: by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Directors, Essays, John Huston

The Maltese Falcon

[Originally written for the National Society of Film Critics anthology The A List: 100 Essential Films (2002)]

In 1539, the Knight Templars of Malta, paid tribute to Charles V of Spain, by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels – but pirates seized the galley carrying the priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day.

The black bird
The spell cast by the black bird

That crawl appears following the opening credits of The Maltese Falcon, set to dreamy-sinister music and laid over a dark image of the peregrine statuary seemingly poised in some undiscovered tomb. The grammar is regrettable (surely it should be Knights-Templar?), and suggestive of some haste. Was the foreword perhaps added at the last minute, in an act of desperation, after preview audiences had grown fidgety with reel upon reel of baroque conversations and ornately peculiar comings and goings in a collection of offices and hotel rooms purporting to be modern-day (1941) San Francisco? More than half the film elapses before anyone even mentions the titular bird, let alone accounts for its immense value and lurid history. Yet strike the keynote with that one-sentence prelude and the mantle of legend settles over the entire proceedings.

Of course, The Maltese Falcon has become positively encrusted with legend in the six decades since its release. It’s the classic hardboiled private-eye movie; the nervy maiden offering of its celebrated director, John Huston; the first glamorous star vehicle for Humphrey Bogart, an icon of American cinema and the 20th century’s definition of existential cool; and still the most triumphantly well-cast movie from Hollywood’s golden age (rivaled only by Casablanca). Watching The Maltese Falcon now, everybody and his brother know they’re in the presence of something extraordinary. But it’s tantalizing to contemplate how easily the brass ring might have been missed – how close the picture might have come to being just another detective thriller, like the two previous screen versions of Dashiell Hammett’s groundbreaking novel (respectively so-so, in 1931, and ludicrous, in 1936).

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Posted in: Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews

Bogie and Bergman: DVDs of the Month

Humphrey Bogart: The Essential Collection (Warner)
The Maltese Falcon Blu-ray
(Warner)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Blu-ray
(Warner)

Sam Wilson and Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca”

Humphrey Bogart was the first Hollywood star I embraced. Watching him hold down the center of Casablanca with a pose of populist existentialism covering his wounded romanticism (“Where were you last night?” “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.” “Will I see you tonight?” “I never make plans that far ahead.”), I thought he was the coolest cat I’d ever seen on the screen. There’s not a lot new to say about the Bogie, and not much I can add to Dave Kehr’s excellent piece in the New York Times on the icon, the actor and the movie star in relation to the great new box set Humphrey Bogart: The Essential Collection (Warner). I received the set late, just after returning from Vancouver and nursing the end days of a pesky head cold, so I’ve not had as much time and energy as I would have liked to dive into the set.

However, I can still offer a tour of the selections in the set through notes and reviews I wrote on earlier viewings of the films and coverage of their previous release on DVD. Yes, each of the 24 films in the set have been previously available on DVD, both individually and in various box set incarnations, and the supplements from those excellent Warner volumes are ported over. But the remarkable efficiency of this box set (12 two-sided flipper discs in six thinpak cases, plus a couple of extras, more on those later) and the amazing price tag ($100 retail, less with inevitable markdowns) brings the price per film to under $4 apiece.

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Posted in: Uncategorized

John Huston: Withholding Judgment

[Parts of the article previously appeared in Cinemonkey and as program notes for Cinema 7]

Film critics have never quite known what to make of John Huston; whether his work has been praised or disparaged, it has almost always inspired critical overkill. After a striking debut with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and a pair of studio assignments, Huston made several highly-regarded war documentaries. His fourth feature, Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), widely acclaimed as authentic film art (at a time when the phrase had little currency in discussions of American movies), inspired the most eloquent and passionate of Huston’s early defenders, James Agee, to write a now-classic Life magazine article, “Undirectable Director” (1950) summarizing Huston as follows:

The Maltese Falcon is the best private-eye melodrama ever made. San Pietro… is generally considered to be the finest of war documentaries. Treasure of Sierra Madre… is the clearest proof in perhaps twenty years that first-rate work can come out of the big commercial studios…. To put it conservatively, there is nobody under fifty at work in movies, here or abroad, who can excel Huston in talent, inventiveness, intransigence, achievement or promise.

The Maltese Falcon: "the greatest
The Maltese Falcon: "the best private-eye melodrama ever made"?

Even at the time, Agee overstated Huston’s achievement and promise, both as to his career and individual films. And by the time of Moby Dick (1956), Huston had amply shown he could be erratic as well. But neither Agee nor anyone else could have predicted the calamitous late-50s decline that produced The Barbarian and the Geisha and The Roots of Heaven (both 1958), and The Unforgiven (1960), followed shortly by The List of Adrian Messenger (1963). Such a casually cynical mélange of the half-heartedly perfunctory and outright hackwork was bound to get a critical comeuppance. Andrew Sarris obliged, firing a famous broadside in the Huston chapter of the indispensable survey: The American Cinema. After casually noting that “James Agee canonized Huston prematurely” Sarris brought out the heavy artillery:

Huston is still coasting on his reputation as a wronged individualist with an alibi for every bad movie…Huston has confused indifference with integrity for such a long time that he is no longer the competent craftsman of The Asphalt Jungle, The Maltese Falcon, and The African Queen, films that owe more to casting coups than to directorial acumen.

Sarris has subsequently reconsidered his polemical hyperbole, and doubtless regrets the peculiar suggestion that skill in casting has nothing to do with “directorial acumen.”

But Huston’s work has remained maddeningly variable, sometimes blowing hot and cold in the same film Read More “John Huston: Withholding Judgment”