![]() Because of Hammett's usage, the word came to take on "gunman" as a secondary meaning. Hammett got away with it in the book, and it slipped past the Production Code censors when it popped up in the screenplay. Gunsel-from the Yiddish word for "little goose," and passed along in American hobo culture-was merely a synonym for "catamite," but was too new to be familiar. ![]() Hammett replaced it with " gunsel," which his editor assumed meant “gunslinger” or some such. While Hammett's novel identified Cairo (Peter Lorre’s character) as a homosexual and hinted at it for Wilmer and Gutman, this term was considered too explicit. Hammett used the same word in his novel, but only after his editor objected to the word he used first: "catamite," which is a young man kept by an older man for sexual purposes. Sam Spade uses the word “gunsel” three times in reference to Wilmer, the hitman who works for Kasper Gutman, a.k.a. IT GOT AWAY WITH USING AN OBJECTIONABLE WORD, PROBABLY BECAUSE THE CENSORS WEREN'T COOL ENOUGH TO KNOW IT. When the film was a hit, the rat-a-tat pace became one of the hallmarks of film noir. Huston, eager to please on his first film, took the note to heart and instructed everyone accordingly. They asked Huston to pick up the pace by having Bogart (and the others) talk faster. HUMPHREY BOGART'S ICONIC RAPID-FIRE DELIVERY WAS THE RESULT OF A STUDIO NOTE.ĭetective Sam Spade had a lot of speeches, which the Warners felt tended to slow things down. Huston was lucky, therefore, that Raft didn't want to work with a first-time director and turned the movie down, leaving Huston free to cast his pal Bogie. (He'd been their first choice for High Sierra, too.) The Warners had given Huston free rein to make whatever movie he wanted, but they insisted on keeping some control over the casting. He was the Warners' first choice for The Maltese Falcon. George Raft was a handsome actor and dancer who'd narrowly escaped an actual life of crime (his boyhood friends included Bugsy Siegel) to become someone who merely played a lot of gangsters. THE STUDIO WANTED GEORGE RAFT TO PLAY THE LEAD. It was the first of five movies Huston and Bogart would make together. The Maltese Falcon, also starring Bogart, was shot that summer and released in the fall. Fortunately for Huston, it was a success, and the Warners kept their word. That was High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart, directed by Raoul Walsh, and released in January 1941. When he asked the Warners for a shot at directing, they agreed (and even let him choose the project himself), but only if his next script was a hit. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) and Sergeant York (1941). in the late 1930s, earning Oscar nominations for Dr. John Huston, son of popular stage and screen actor Walter Huston, was a successful scriptwriter for Warner Bros. IT WOULDN'T EXIST IF HIGH SIERRA HADN'T BEEN A HIT. ![]() (This version is notable for coming out before the Hollywood Production Code started to be enforced, which means it has more sexual innuendo than the films of the late '30s and '40s.) In 1936, the studio made the film again, this time under the title Satan Met a Lady, and with an inexplicable emphasis on the comedy aspects, starring Warren William and Bette Davis. snatched up the movie rights and produced a version in 1931 starring Ricardo Cortez as the hardboiled detective and Bebe Daniels as the femme fatale. MADE IT TWICE BEFORE, INCLUDING ONCE AS A COMEDY.ĭashiell Hammett first published The Maltese Falcon as a serialized story in the crime-fiction magazine Black Mass, following it (in 1930) with a proper hardcover release. Here are some facts about the 75-year-old mystery. It was, to quote its last line of dialogue, the stuff dreams are made of. The latter film quickly became a classic, viewed as the first major "film noir" and a prototype for the genre of hardboiled detectives, femmes fatales, and carefully placed shadows. By the end of 1941, moviegoers had a new favorite star in Humphrey Bogart, a minor actor whose back-to-back starring roles in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon catapulted him to fame. ![]()
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