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Sam Spade

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Dashiell Hammett
(1894-1961)

“When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens we’re in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it’s—it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.”
— Sam Spade

The original blonde Satan, Dashiell Hammett‘s SAM SPADE is one of the most important figures in the entire private eye genre. He made his debut in 1929 in the pages of Black Mask, in which the The Maltese Falcon was first serialized, and crime fiction has never been the same since.

Spade’s a “hard and shifty fellow,” a partner in the Archer and Spade Detective Agency of San Francisco and nobody’s idea of a hero. Sure, he likes Effie Perrine, the secretary, and he probably wouldn’t kick a small dog, but he’s not above cutting a corner or two, and he doesn’t particularly like his partner — nor is he above sleeping with his wife. But when Miles is murdered, he swings into action, and ends up mixed up with a quest for a priceless, black enamelled statuette, a rara-avis called the Maltese Falcon.

Collected and published in book form in 1930, the novel was an instant bestseller (it caused such a sensation that within the next twelve years years, it would be adapted into a movie not once, not twice, but three times).  Even today, the novel stands as a true classics of the genre; a vastly influential piece of work, chockfull of memorable lines and featuring one of the very first P.I.s “with his own private, unorthodox, but absolutely inviolable code of ethics,” according to William DeAndrea, in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. And oh, what a cast of characters he has to deal with: Brigid O’Shaughnessy (or is it Miss Wonderly), a dame who tells so many lies she can’t keep track of them all; Joel Cairo, an effeminate art dealer whose motives stink worse than his corsage; the jolly chunk of corruption and greed that is Casper Gutman, whom everyone refers to as “The Fat Man,” and Gutman’s “gunsel” Wilmer, the Fat Man’s boy toy, who wants desperately to be seen as a tough guy.

The novel’s success even prompted Hammett to churn out three subsequent short stories featuring Mrs. Spade’s favourite cash-hungry son in the early thirties. They were all pretty solid, but the general consensus was that hey paled in comparison to the original novel, but Hey! — any Hammett is well worth reading. They were eventiually collected and published in book form as A Man Called Spade.

But the black bird’s impact was not only literary — the third film adaptation, rookie director John Huston’s 1941 version, became one of the most popular and important films in history; arguably the first film noir, and pretty much defined the hard-boiled private eye for the general public for decades to come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hammett’s one of the seminal creators in detective fiction. As if writing The Maltese Falcon wasn’t enough, he was also responsible for such enduring characters as The Continental Op and Nick and Nora Charles, husband and wife sleuths who were introduced in The Thin Man, and became the basis for a string of popular movies.

ABOUT THOSE MOVIES

Hail, hail, the gang’s all here. From the 1941 film, left to right: Spade, Cairo, O’Shaugnessy and Gutman.

Next time some meathead loudly proclaims “Remakes suck!,” kindly inform him  that it isn’t always the case. The Maltese Falcon is one glorious exception.

The first attempt at bringing Spade to the big screen was The Maltese Falcon (subsequently known as “A Dangerous Female”), directed by Roy del Ruth and starring Ricardo Cortez as Spade. It was a solid, if unspectacular film, buoyed by being made pre-Hayes Code, and therefore allowing more overt references to the plot’s many sexual situations. But Cortez played Spade as a smirking womanizer, too smug and lightweight to possibly be taken seriously, and it didn’t help that the film was flawed by an anti-climatic jailhouse ending that merely reinforced the notion of Spade being something of a shit.

Even so,  there was a lot I liked about this version. The women in it were well cast, and easy on the eyes. I liked the guy who played Archer –his being much older than Iva made sense. And I did like the fact Spade at least appeared to have a sex drive (which made him even more credible as a shit to Iva than Bogart was). I thought the women on the whole were more believable (and a whole lot sexier) and the exposition a lot clearer (even if some of the book was MIA). But what struck me the most was how much Huston’s undeniably superior version followed this one. The identical camera angles, the set-ups, the framing of shots — even the way the actors delivered their lines are virtually identical. In fact, the 1941 cast looks almost like it was chosen for its resemblance to the 1931 originals — as though del Ruth filmed the rehearsal and ten years later Huston tidied up the rough edges.

(I’m beginning to think the whole story about Huston handing his secretary Hammett’s book and telling her to type up just the dialogue is a crock. I think possibly he used del Ruth’s earlier script as a guideline).

The second version, Satan Met a Lady (Warner Bros., 1936), on the other hand, was a mess, as though director William Dieterle couldn’t decide if he was making a screwball comedy or a crime film. Many changes were made to the original plot, the characters, even the title. None for the better. Sam Spade is now, for no apparent reason, Ted Shane, and the Fat Man is now the Fat Lady, while a young Bette Davis is pretty lacklustre as Miss Wonderly. More perplexing is why the infamous Black Bird is now a ram’s horn. Generally considered poorly acted, forced and dull, some have argued that it’s a spoof, but of what? Warren William as Spade had possibly the biggest head in Hollywood, but so what? At the end of the film, having finally grabbed the bejewelled horn, he gives it a tentative toot, which pleases him immensely. “Honey, it blows,” he informs Miss Wonderly.

I know how he feels.

But the third time was the charm. The Maltese Falcon, released in 1941 by Warner Brothers, written and directed by John Huston, and starring Humphrey Bogart as Spade was an amazing, powerful piece of work that still stands as one of the all-time great films of american cinema. Okay, Bogey didn’t match the description of Spade in the book — he was too small and too dark — but has anyone ever pictured anyone else playing Spade ever since? It made him a star — in fact, Bogart was so good as Spade that his later appearance as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep never seemed quite right to me. Toss in a memorable cast of colourful characters (Mary Astor as Bridgid O’Shaugnessy, Lee Patrick as Effie Perrine, Sydney Greenstreet as Casper Gutman, Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo and Elisha Cook Jr. as Wilmer Cook) and a taut, moody screenplay that boiled down the novel to its essence, and you’ve got the making of the archetypical private eye film. Decades later, film makers are still trying to crawl out from its shadow.

There was even a rumoured plan to do a sequel with Bogart and the rest, although — thank God! — it never came to fruition. A comic sequel, The Black Bird, was filmed with George Segal as Sam Spade’s son, spoofed the original in the early ’70s. It never laid a finger on the original.

RADIO

By the mid-forties, Spade had also established himself as a wildly popular staple of the airwaves, thanks to The Adventures of Sam Spade, a popular radio show, featuring Howard Duff in the lead role. If anyone asks, his private detective’s license was “137596 and he wrapped up each program by dictating a report on the case to “Effie” and finished off with “Period. End of report.”

The faithful sponsor was Wildroot Cream-Oil, who also ran a series of single-page comic ads in magazines, newspapers and comic books, with Spade shilling the product. (The ads were drawn by Golden Age artist Lou Fine, who later went on to do the Peter Scratch comic strip.)

In fact, the only real sequel to The Maltese Falcon was not produced for either prose or film, though, but for radio, as a special one-hour Spade episode called “The Khandi Tooth Caper.”  The episode was a direct sequel to The Maltese Falcon, with Spade once again meeting Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer’s kid brother, another “gunsel.” It explains what happened to the real Falcon, alludes to Brigid O’Shaugnessy’s fate, and sets Spade and the bad guys at odds as they  search for another quest object, the fabled Khandi Tooth. As an inside joke, Robert Montgomery, who played Philip Marlowe in the film version of The Lady in the Lake, makes a cameo appearance as Marlowe in the episode. A few years later, the episode aired on Suspense, where Montgomery was the host.

At its peak, The Adventures of Sam Spade was so popular it even inspired a 1950 spin-off, Sara’s Private Capers. But by then, the political landscape had changed, the Cold War was on, and Hammett and his left-leaning views had fallen out of favor. The popular radio show was canned, and suddenly Hammett didn’t exist. The show was retitled Charlie Wild, Private Eye (to cash in on Wildroots commercial slogan: “Get Wildroot Cream Oil, Charlie”) and all connections to Hammett were erased. And just for good measure, Duff was also out. But it was essentially the same show, the same hair tonic sponsor, etc. And it was Wild, not Spade, who eventually made the jump to television.

COMICS

In 1946, The Maltese Falcon was presented in comic book form, adapted by Rodlow Williard and published by David McKay, as Feature Book #48, and distributed by King Features Syndicate. The adaptation was quite well-done, very faithful to both the book and the film.

THE EVIDENCE

UNDER OATH

SHORT STORIES

NOVELS

COLLECTIONS

SAM SPADE BY OTHER AUTHORS

FILMS

RADIO & AUDIO PERFORMANCES

COMICS

TELEVISION

COLLECTIBLES

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Jim Doherty for the scoop on the Maltese Falcon radio sequel, Steve Tussel, who runs Detective Fiction on Stamps for (what else?) the stamp of approval, Matthew Hirsch for letting me in on whodunit and Norma Cooper for not letting me get lost in the Sea of Cortez.

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