January 12, 2021
The Maltese Falcon (1941) ****
TCM
Free
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Amazingly enough, last night I was not overly tired! So, even though I was starting on the late side, I wasn’t desperately scrolling through the TCM app trying to find something barely over an hour long, there was the good old Maltese Falcon, one of my favourites, at 1h 40m and I was not at all daunted! Also, I had some cross-stitching that I really wanted to finish, and thought that, because I know the movie so well, it would be very easy to listen and watch with one eye while getting some work done.
Turns out, the reason it’s one of my favourite movies is because it’s very engaging! I did get some stitching done, but not as much as I wanted to, but I’m not complaining.
It doesn’t matter how many times I watch this movie, I am just entirely taken in by the story, the acting, the atmosphere, all of it.
Here’s my favorite bit of trivia, that I only discovered in the past decade or so. Do you know how Bogart keeps calling Elisha Cook Jr. a gunsel, and how we totally think that means young man with a gun? Well, it means that now, because of this movie, but at the time, it only meant one thing: butt boy. So, every time he says it, he is calling him Sydney Greenstreet’s bottom, which is one of the reasons Cook Jr. is so pissed at him. Notice how Greenstreet doesn’t care a bit!
What I didn’t know before yesterday, was the reason Dashiell Hammett used that particular slang, was because the story was originally serialized in a magazine called The Black Mask, whose editor didn’t allow vulgarities, and Hammett snuck it in because he wouldn’t understand the true meaning of the term.
But the thing I didn’t notice until I watched it last night, was at the end, when Greenstreet asks Peter Lorre to come with him to Istanbul, he’s really asking him to be his new gunsel! Cook Jr. has run off, Peter Lorre has already been firmly established as gay in more than one scene, why should the Fat Man have to go on a search when he has a perfectly good replacement right there in front of him. And look how happy Lorre is! So, Bogart and Mary Astor don’t go off into the sunset together, but Greenstreet and Lorre do, instead.
365 Films in 365 Days 