silver nitrate notes

Huston's Maltese Falcon and the Close-up Conversation

16 mar 2014

John Huston (1906-1987) had been a screenwriter at Warner Bros for a decade when the studio, in 1941, gave him his first directing job. The property was Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, which had already been filmed twice, in 1931 and 1936, to no particular effect. Huston's adaptation is, more or less, the novel. He kept the dialogue. He kept the chapter structure. The visual decisions are his.

What Huston decided, with the cinematographer Arthur Edeson (1891-1970), was to photograph the film mostly in close-ups and medium shots. The 1931 version had been a wide-framed picture full of decorative backgrounds. Huston threw away the backgrounds. Sam Spade's office is a small set with three walls and a door. Casper Gutman's hotel room is a small set with three walls and a door. The Greek steamer where the falcon arrives is a small set with three walls and a door. The film has no establishing shots worth remembering. It has conversations, and the conversations are photographed tight.

Edeson's lighting is noir before anyone used the word. Each room has a single source, usually a practical lamp on a table or a window with blinds. Bogart's face, photographed from the side with the near side underlit, becomes the face we mean when we say Bogart. Peter Lorre, playing Joel Cairo, is photographed almost straight on with a key light low and close so that his eyes become two bright spots in a face otherwise in shadow. Sydney Greenstreet, playing Gutman, is photographed from slightly below to make him architectural.

The plot of the film is famously difficult to follow on first viewing. Huston did not care. The film works because the conversations are composed to work. You can watch Spade and Gutman in the hotel-room scene ten times and not fully track who is double-crossing whom; what you can track is that the two men are taking each other's measure, that the taking of measure is the scene, and that Edeson's lighting tells you to watch Bogart's mouth and Greenstreet's eyes. Everything else is scaffolding.

Bogart had been a supporting actor for twelve years before The Maltese Falcon. He was in his forties. The film made him a star in six weeks. The last shot, of him walking down the police station stairs with the falcon in its burlap wrap, is the image Warner Brothers sold him on for the next two decades. They were right to.

[ « prev: La Grande Illusion · next: The Lady Vanishes » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons. Scribner, 1989.
[2] Cooper, Stephen. Perspectives on John Huston. G.K. Hall, 1994.
[3] Luhr, William. The Maltese Falcon. Rutgers Films in Print, 1995.
[4] Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. University of California Press, 1998.