The bird

The Maltese Falcon

(1931)

No, seriously: you really should see this first film treatment once, exactly once. It's not terrible, though it is inferior to the version you're familiar with in almost every way. Mainly, it's interesting is some respects. It's pre-Breen, so the sexuality is blunter (Sam has just banged a putative client at the start, and the nature of his relationship with Ruth Wonderly [she never morphs into Bridget O'Shaughenessey here] is perfectly clear), but that's not particularly interesting, merely different.

Ricardo Cortez, who plays Sam Spade, is so awful as to be sacrilegious, but the character too is much less sympathetic than Bogart's. He's just a slimy smarmball, or vice versa. Oddly, that makes it more convincing that he could actually have fallen in love with the devil-woman, but uglier that he throws her over. The speech about "maybe you love me and maybe I love you," one of the highlights of the Huston film, is absent. On the other hand, Dudley Digges as Gutman does some stage business with a flyswatter that Sydney Greenstreet must have admired--he didn't use it as the Fat Man, but later, as Signor Ferrari, he found a place for it.

Oh, and there's this: in this version Miles is shot in Chinatown, and Sam has a conversation with a Chinese witness at the crime scene, in Cantonese, I guess. But that throwaway sequence comes back in a big way that changes absolutely everything about the story, and since you're unlikely ever to see this version regardless of my urging (check the TCM schedule), I'm tempted to tell you, but I won't. I will tell you, though, to look for the Louise Brooks photo on the wall of Sam's apartment.

And if you rent the DVD linked to above, you also get Bette Davis in Satan Met a Lady, the second film version of the Hammett novel, which I've never seen but am told is far worse than the first. Which is, I guess, ultimately the best reason to see this one: so that when someone says "Remakes are always inferior to the original," you can arch an eyebrow and ask, "Ever seen the 1931 Maltese Falcon?"