Craig Zablo

Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 13 Mysterious Facts About The Maltese Falcon.  Here are three of my favorites…

2. IT WOULDN’T EXIST IF HIGH SIERRA HADN’T BEEN A HIT.
John Huston, son of popular stage and screen actor Walter Huston, was a successful scriptwriter for Warner Bros. in the late 1930s, earning Oscar nominations for Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and Sergeant York (1941). When he asked the Warners for a shot at directing, they agreed (and even let him choose the project himself), but only if his next script was a hit. That was High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart, directed by Raoul Walsh, and released in January 1941. Fortunately for Huston, it was a success, and the Warners kept their word. The Maltese Falcon, also starring Bogart, was shot that summer and released in the fall. It was the first of five movies Huston and Bogart would make together.

4. HUMPHREY BOGART’S ICONIC RAPID-FIRE DELIVERY WAS THE RESULT OF A STUDIO NOTE.
Detective Sam Spade had a lot of speeches, which the Warners felt tended to slow things down. They asked Huston to pick up the pace by having Bogart (and the others) talk faster. Huston, eager to please on his first film, took the note to heart and instructed everyone accordingly. When the film was a hit, the rat-a-tat pace became one of the hallmarks of film noir.

5. IT GOT AWAY WITH USING AN OBJECTIONABLE WORD, PROBABLY BECAUSE THE CENSORS WEREN’T COOL ENOUGH TO KNOW IT.
Sam Spade uses the word “gunsel” three times in reference to Wilmer, the hitman who works for Kasper Gutman, a.k.a. the Fat Man. Hammett used the same word in his novel, but only after his editor objected to the word he used first: “catamite,” which is a young man kept by an older man for sexual purposes. While Hammett’s novel identified Cairo (Peter Lorre’s character) as a homosexual and hinted at it for Wilmer and Gutman, this term was considered too explicit. Hammett replaced it with “gunsel,” which his editor assumed meant “gunslinger” or some such. But it didn’t. Gunsel—from the Yiddish word for “little goose,” and passed along in American hobo culture—was merely a synonym for “catamite,” but was too new to be familiar. Hammett got away with it in the book, and it slipped past the Production Code censors when it popped up in the screenplay. Because of Hammett’s usage, the word came to take on “gunman” as a secondary meaning. But make no mistake, it wasn’t Wilmer’s possession of a firearm that Sam Spade was referring to.