Last night, I noticed The Maltese Falcon was on television, so I curled up happily with some knitting and sat down to watch it. Unfortunately, I got a phone call towards the end and wasn’t taping it, so now I don’t know who did it. I know I could Google it or IMDB it, but I like the commentary here better.
Please, some merciful Dopers, tell me how it ends! I’ll throw in some blank lines for safety before telling you where I was when I quit watching.
It’s the climactic scene, I think. Spade, Guttman, Cairo, and O’Shaugnessy are gathered together with the bird. Spade is saying he needs a fall guy and is suggesting they use the gunsel (a direct ancestor of the Star Trek red shirts?). The gunsel’s looking understandably nervous. At that point, alas, my phone rang.
What happens next?!
Thanks!
Edited to add spoiler tags even though I asked for open spoilers
If someone doesn’t want to be spoiled, they probably shouldn’t enter this thread with its enourmous “open spoilers welcome” notice in the thread title.
Which gunsel are you talking about? Wilmer? Didn’t he escape while the rest were gathered around the bird, and then Spade notified the cops about him at the same time he notified them about Gutman and Cairo?
To expand on the summary a bit, the bird is indeed a fake. Cairo has a tizzy crying jag about it but perks up when Gutman suggests they continue the quest. Gutman gets his money back from Spade, les $1000 for “time and expenses.” Spade declines Gutman’s invitation to join them.
Spade calls the cops and reports Wilmer, Gutman and Cairo. He confronts Brigid and she confesses to killing his partner. He promises to wiat for her to get out of prison if she isn’t hanged. The cops come in and arrest her. Spade turns over the $1000 he collected from Gutman and the fake bird. As everyone is leaving for the station, the cop notes that the bird is heavy and wonders what it is, leading Spade to note that it’s “the stuff that dreams are made of.”
Why you answered the phone at that point in the film is a bigger mystery than any in the film itself.
They were planning to give up Wilmer to the cops for the fire, the murder of Floyd Thursby, and all the other crimes the three committed.
But once they left, Spade turns to Brigid and says that he knows that she was the one who killed Miles Archer (his partner). Archer would never have gone to Wilmer with his gun holster, but he was “just stupid enough” to approach Brigid. She shot him, and was taking the fall. <music sting>
Spade goes over the issues: you’re not supposed to let your partner’s killer go free, even if you didn’t like the partner. If she got away with murder, what’s to prevent her from killing him to keep the secret? He couldn’t trust her, and she couldn’t trust him knowing he held this over her. Also, without giving up Brigid, Spade might be on the hook for Archer’s murder.
Spade says it’s a long list of reasons to turn her in (“Maybe some aren’t important, but look at the number of them”), but there was only one reason not to, “Maybe I love you and maybe you love me.”
“You know you do,” says Brigid.
Spade doesn’t say anything and insists that she’s going to have to take the fall. Brigid says that he wouldn’t have done that if the Falcon was real. Spade says he’s really not as corrupt as he pretends to be, and that would have been just one more thing on the equation. He says she’ll probably only get 20 years, and he hopes it won’t ruin her pretty face.
There was a George segal comedy called The Black Bird, in which it turns out that the Maltese Falcon was not a fake – it was the real, jewel-encrusted bird, mistaken for a fake. Sam spade’s secretary returned to reprise her role (as did at least one other character, I think – pretty impressive for a semisequel made thirty years after the original). I never saw it, and i don’t think it fared well with critics.
And of course there were two earlier film adaptations of the novel, one called The Maltese Falcon and the other called Satan Was a Lady starring Bette Davis. I think I have the latter on tape somewhere; I’ll have to dig it up and watch it.
I like the part where Gutman says that he has been chasing the falcon for 17 years, so one more year will be “an additional expenditure in time of only five and fifteen seventeenths percent”. He has the soul of an actuary.
That’s the only thing that ever bothered me about the movie. How the hell did they fall in “love” so damned fast? They didn’t know anything about each other. Spade seemed too smart to fall in love with a total stranger he’d never even been out on a social date with. I do believe in love at first sight but I didn’t believe it in this case. I think for her she just wanted to use him, but for him? There’s nothing, no reason whatsoever for him to love her, they were just words from a screenplay (meaning, it was just there because the plot needed it to be there).
Otherwise, a great movie.
I can close my eyes and picture Elisha Cook Jr. as Wilmer, but am totally blanking out on what happened to him. I do need to see it again.
I wondered about that, myself. I didn’t pick up much in the way of chemistry between them, but that may just be me. In the introduction to the movie (it was on Turner Classic Movies, they mentioned the two earlier adaptations and said that this one was closest to the novel. Perhaps the novel explains it better?
I have always thought that this movie had the most unnecesary spoiler imagineable built into it. I could never understand why, in a mystery picture, the mystery (What is it that the bad guys are trying to get) is given away in a prologue before the picture begins the story. When I recommend the picture to people who have never seen it, I tell them to avert their eyes during the prologue.
It was years before I got that they had sex the night she stayed in Sam’s apartment. That moment when he grabs her and they have a big smootch and we fade out? It’s “understood” that she stays, they have sex, and the next morning–because they had sex, you see, and everyone knows if you had sex you’re “in love”–so, hey presto, they’re in love.
We already know Sam knows nothing about really being in love–he’s been boffing his partner’s wife. Sheesh.
Nope. I prefer the novel to the movie, because it does explain things better, but the whole “Brigid and Sam are in love” thing fares equally poorly in the novel. To me, it read as if Sam were mocking her at the end, as if he’d known all along what was going on and simply had used her. The novel does make it very clear that she and Sam are lovers (clear but not explicit), but it really doesn’t explain why they talk about being in love.
One can suppose that she loves him precisely because she can’t manipulate him. She’s a prime manipulator (which, again, comes across much better in the book, but then I didn’t really think that Mary Astor was all that good in the role), and I suppose that he’s a novelty she really hasn’t come across before.
One point a lot of modern viewers miss is that a “gunsel” is not a slang term for a gunman. It actually meant a person who was forced into a homosexual relationship in prison. Spade also calls Wilmer a “punk” at one point and this also used to have a homosexual connotation.
He bettered himself in prison through education. Upon his parole he attended law school at night and after some years of practice in San Francisco was caught in a freak time vortex and spent his remaining years practicing on
federation outposts. Notably defending Captain James T “Loose Cannon” Kirk when he was court marshalled for illegal podcasting in an ion storm.
The OP was spot on.
The movie makes it clear (well, as clear as any movie in the 1940s could) that Gutman, Wilmer, and Cairo were all homosexuals (or, rather, a 40s stereotype of homosexuals). Gutman and Wilmer are obvious once you know about “gunsel” (and there are other lines of dialog that are very interesting in that context: “Wilmer has been like a son to me”). And the reaction by Effie and Sam to Cairo’s calling card is also a sign.
Wilmer showed up in The Black Bird. IIRC, he was the one who revealed the Falcon was real.
As for the falling in love – this was a 40s movie. People fell in love on short notice all the time. Consider The Clock, where two people fell in love and get married in 48 hours.
