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MMM Flashback Friday: The Maltese Falcon

maltese falcon posterTo celebrate the movie’s 75th anniversary, The Maltese Falcon is coming to over 650 theaters across the country over the next few days. So it’s a perfect time to look back on how the movie was sold upon its initial release.

Based on the Dashiell Hammett novel, the movie stars Humphrey Bogart as Hammett’s frequent protagonist Sam Spade. Spade takes on a case involving a priceless artifact – the mysterious Maltese Falcon – that he must track down and procure for a shady group of individuals. That case is brought to him by Ruth Wonderly (Mary Astor), who also tells Spade is private eye partner is dead. The movie also stars Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, both of whom were frequent Warner Bros. studio players and often played heavies or other shady characters. It’s often held up as one of the quintessential examples of film noir, with its morally-questionable protagonists, mysterious and sometimes deadly women and heavy shadings of both design and character.

The theatrical poster is kind of great and shows off a lot of the style, if not the substance, of the movie. Bogart is at the top with a gun in both hands, the copy next to him claiming it’s “A story as explosive as his blazing automatics.” Astor is at the bottom leaning back in a seductive pose, clearly showing her as the femme fatale of the story. Below the title treatment is a mention that it comes from the Hammett book (name-dropping that he’s the author of The Thin Man, which we’ll see again later) and then listing the supporting cast.

It’s such a wonderful work of art and it’s easy to see how this would attract an audience in 1941. It’s bold and brash, with manly men and feminine females. The artistic touches are spread throughout and it just gives off a very cool vibe that would have been instantly recognizable to fans of the noir genre at the time. You can also see some of the lobby cards that promoted the movie in theaters at TCM.com.  

The trailer opens with Sidney Greenstreet narrating and telling the audience directly what they can expect in a story about scheming men, beautiful women and more. That’s obviously a play on Greenstreet’s recognizability as one of the premiere character actors of the era. It also works to setup the pulpy story we’re about to be sold as the trailer transitions to actual footage from the movie, beginning with a confrontation between Bogart and Astor. From there we see Bogart outsmarting his adversaries, wooing the women around him and more. There isn’t much dialogue as on-screen text works to sell the tone of the story. It also references how these roles by Bogart and Astor are even better than their previous movies.

What jumps out at me most about the trailer is there’s very little about the plot here. The titular Falcon is name-dropped once or twice and it’s clear there’s a mystery at the heart of the story but that’s about it. That’s notable in and of itself but when you couple that with the prominent placement of Dashiell Hammett’s name it’s clear the studio is presupposing some knowledge of the source material in the audience. They assume the people who are going to come see the movie, at least a sizable portion of the audience, knows the story because they’ve read the book. That’s underlined by how at the end it touts the story as being another great story from the author of The Thin Man, which had been turned into a movie seven years earlier.

That’s an astounding assumption when you look at it in the light of how book adaptations are sold today. Far from assuming that people have read the source material and don’t need to have the story laid out for them, the story is often laid out even more clearly for people. These days the studios need to make already familiar material even *more* familiar to people who don’t want any surprises in their entertainment.

It’s great that the campaign as a whole believes it is speaking to an educated and aware audience. And I miss the days of stunning noir artwork like what’s on display here. We can think that the trailers feel stilted now but look at what it’s trying to do and you can see why this movie went on to become a classic not just of the noir genre but of film in general.

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