Sidebar: A Memo from Joseph Breen

A (possibly apocryphal) story I’ve heard about Huston’s adaptation of The Maltese Falcon was that Huston was going on vacation before beginning work on the script. Before he left, he asked his secretary to transcribe the book’s dialogue into script form so he’d have something to work with when he got back. While he was gone, his secretary’s transcription was accidentally sent to studio head Jack L. Warner, who loved the “script” and directed a very surprised Huston to begin filming immediately.

A confidential informant (see Greg, I protected your identity!)  

Greg and I were batting this around in the comments section earlier today, and it got my juices flowing, to the extent they can flow nowadays.  Is it possible that maybe the most famous and revered crime movie of all time resulted from a director being forced to film his secretary’s transcription of a novel’s dialogue? No it is not, but could some version of this story be true?  How much do we know about what went on over at the Warner’s lot back then?

I’d hate to have to tell you who I had to kill to get what I’m about to share with you all now.  Mainly because I’d hate for you all to know what a humdrum existence I lead.

I pulled down this venerable dusty tome (paperback, I’m not made of money) that I recently obtained for research purposes, entitled Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade, by one Richard Layman.  (Clearly an alias.  Perhaps a defrocked clergyman.)

I found this.  You tell me whether it supports our source’s secondhand allegation–or dismantles it.  I honestly don’t know.

(Please note, the original memo, which the so-called Layman reproduces in photostatic form, was not in block format, but I just can’t be bothered to hit the tab key that many times.  Old war injury, carpal in nature; I was in the 69th Typist’s Brigade, the Fighting Hunt&Peckers.  Otherwise, I have endeavored to reproduce it faithfully.  Please note, this memo in its original form took up three entire sheets of typing paper, which I shall infer was foolscap.  Single spaced.)

May 27, 1941

 

Mr. Jack L. Warner
Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.
Burbank, California

 

Dear Mr. Warner:

 

We have read the final script, dated May 24, 1941, for your proposed production titled THE MALTESE FALCON, and regret to advise that while the basic story is acceptable, a picture based upon this script could not be approved under the provisions of the Code because of several important objectionable details, namely:

 

(1)    it is indicated that Spade and Brigid have had an illicit sex affair and that the relationship between Spade and Iva has been illicit.

 

(2)    Cairo seems to be characterized as a pansy.

 

(3)    There is a great deal of unnecessary drinking.

 

It will be necessary to overcome these objections before the finished picture could be approved.

 

Going through the script in detail, we call your attention to the following points:

 

Page 13:    Spade’s line, “Damn her !” is unacceptable.

 

Page 14:    In accordance with the Association’s policy re drinking, some other business besides drinking in Spade’s apartment must be substituted on Pages 14 sqq. 19, 50 sqq. and 65 sqq.

 

Page 21:    Any flavor that Spade and Iva have been illicitly intimate must be eliminated from this scene if it is to be approved in the finished picture. Accordingly, it is essential that there be no physical contact between Iva and Spade, other than that of decent sympathy.  In this connection, see Page 80, where the physical contact is unacceptable.  The entire conversation between Iva and Spade will have to be rewritten to get away from this flavor.

 

Page 35:    We cannot approve the characterization of Cairo as a pansy, as indicated by the lavender perfume, high-pitched voice, and other accouterments. In this connection, we refer you to scenes 21, and 115, where Cairo should not appear effeminate while rubbing the boy’s temple.

 

Page 54:    Gruesomeness must be avoided in this shot where Cairo is shown bleeding.

 

Page 67:    This fade-out of Spade and Brigid is unacceptable because of the definite indication of an illicit sex affair.  There must be no indication that Brigid and Spade are spending the night together in Spade’s apartment. Otherwise it cannot be approved in the finished picture.  In this connection, please see Page 75.

 

Page 70:    The Boy’s line, “–you !” and his soundless repetition of the same words will be unacceptable if curse words.

 

Page 81:    While the drinking in these scenes is necessary as a story point, in order to prepare for later scenes where Spade is drugged, we must insist that the actual drinking be kept to the absolute minimum necessary to the development of the plot.  It seems that audiences are offended not so much by the presence of liquor as by the actual drinking.

 

Page 84:    Gutman’s use of the interjection “by Gad”, here and on pages 92, 117, 121, 125, 126, and 128, seems to be offensive if only by the number of times he uses it.  We suggest you use some other interjection at times.

 

There should be no gruesomeness in Scenes 71, 81, 88 and 89.

 

Pages 118 and 119:    Spade’s speech about the District Attorneys should be rewritten to get away from characterizing most District Attorneys as men who will do anything to further their careers.  This is important.

 

Page 141:    Brigid’s line to Spade, “Not after what we’ve been to each other  ” is unacceptable as pointing up the previous sex affair.

 

Page 143:    There must be nothing sex suggestive in Spade’s eyeing of Brigid.

 

Page 144:    The underlined words in Spade’s speech are unacceptable, “I won’t because all of me wants to — wants to say to hell with consequences and do it.”   Likewise, in this conversation between Spade and Brigid, there should be no flavor of a previous sex affair underlying the conversation.

 

Page 147:    The action of Spade putting his hand on Effie’s hip must not be offensive.

 

You understand, of course, that our final judgment must be based upon the finished picture.

 

Cordially yours,

 

Joseph I. Breen.

 

12:HF

C O P Y

Many clues.  I shall look forward to seeing your deductions in the comments section.  But please, no offensive language, unnecessary drinking, or intimations of previous sex affairs.  If any.  I’d say no pansies, but that is now unacceptable, and anyway, some of my favorite people…..

Cordially yours,

Frederick Effing Fitch.

 

 

Reappraisal: Dash and Don

It seems to me that there is entirely too little screaming about the work of Dashiell Hammett. My own shrill yaps have been ascending ever since I first found Red Harvest, and from that day the man has been, God help him, my hero; but I talked only yesterday, I forget why, with two of our leading booksy folk, and they had not heard of that volume, nor had they got around to reading its better, The Maltese Falcon.

From Dorothy Parker’s 1931 New Yorker review of The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, entitled, Oh Look–Two Good Books!  She was a poet, you know.  

Hammett was a major writer, for a lot of reasons, one of them being that the texture in his writing comes so very much from himself.  Writing inside an action genre, where subtleties of character and milieu are not primary considerations, he nevertheless was, word by word and sentence by sentence, subtle and many-layered, both allusive and elusive, delicate and aloof among all the smashing fists and crashing guns.

From The Hardboiled Dicks, a lecture given by Donald Westlake at the Smithsonian in 1982, which I’ve quoted from in the past, and probably will again, but you can read the whole thing in The Getaway Car.  Cut out the middleman. 

Well, that was a long break.  I’m still pondering on a problem piece (political), but while that was percolating, and I was crouched forlornly by my mailbox, waiting for somebody to drop a copy of Westlake’s Red Harvest screenplay in it,  I said to myself, “Hey, maybe I should read The Maltese Falcon.  I hear that’s pretty good.”

Yeah.  Never read it.  I started, years ago, but could not get past Spade being a ‘blonde Satan.’  Which he’s not, really.  Well, he gets up to some deviltry, but he has light brown hair.  Light brown isn’t blonde.  What was Hammett thinking?  Probably not that his snarky shamus would be forever linked with some black Dutchman with a lisp, who had just ditched Broadway for Hollywood. (Grofield would not approve.)

I have this thing, where when I read the book a movie I love was based on, the two duel for supremacy in my mind while I read.  Sometimes they fight to a standstill.  Sometimes the movie wins.  Usually, the book triumphs.  This was one of those times.  Huston great, Hammett greater.  I still heard Bogie’s voice when I read Spade’s dialogue, but even that began to fade after a while.

Movies.  They screw with your perceptions of the books.  Damn them anyway.  The good ones in particular.  And none better than Huston’s.  But never mistake the packing material for the contents.  Excelsior.

So I read it, then read some things about it, came to some conclusions, and after banging my head on my desk a number of times at all the things I knew now that I coulda shoulda woulda known back when I started work on this blog, I did still more reading.  I’m all Kindled up now, ready to dig deep.  New worlds to conquer.

See, I mainly just read the Op stories for background.  Having been assigned Red Harvest for a college course eons before, I knew Westlake had taken that as his model for his anti-Op Tim Smith, in Killing Time. It served as the backbone for several of his most interesting books.

Likewise, I read The Thin Man, because Westlake cited it as an influence on the Mitch Tobin mysteries.  But somehow, the other stuff didn’t pull me in.  I didn’t have the right key to open it.  (Glass, of course.)  Why it somehow never occurred to me that Westlake would have learned from everything written by a man I’ve many times described here as his most important literary influence….

Well, you see, we don’t scream enough about Hammett.  Mrs. Parker was right.  We know of him, of course.  We honor and homage him, we review and reference him, we parody and plagiarize him, we anthologize adapt and and assay him, we do guided tours of San Francisco based on him, and we even write lengthy scholarly biographies and other erudite tomes about him, a privilege accorded to precious few pulp writers.  We know of him.  But do we know him?  Not really.  Not most of us.

Westlake did.

And just as Sergio Leone began his career in earnest by copying Kurosawa, almost shot for shot–well Westlake was never that incautious (movie directors can afford lawsuits a lot easier than novelists), and he went out of his way to contradict and revise his mentor, but fact is, a bit of creative copying can teach you things you can’t learn any other way.  It shouldn’t be how you finish, but it’s the only way to begin.

Hammett was a part of Westlake to the very end, but it’s at the start that the influence is most powerful–and, if you’re looking close, obvious. I can see it all so clearly now.  I couldn’t then.

And because by the early 60’s, Westlake was more and more aware that his future was in novels, not short stories, it’s the five Hammett novels–each one different from the last–that we need to put under the magnifying glass now.

Hammett died on January 10th, 1961, which I would think only intensified Mr. Westlake’s   devotion, but he was already on the case.  Just five months earlier, in August, Westlake’s first novel under his own name (also the first he’d want anybody to know he’d written) had gotten a quick complimentary write-up in Criminals At Large, Anthony Boucher’s round-up mystery column in the New York Times.

Brief and glancing as that Boucher review is, Hammett is referenced in it.  As is a novel by Hammett.  That’s what we’re looking at next.  It’s late Hammett, but we’re doing this in Westlake’s order.

Touché, Boucher.  You got it.  Why didn’t I?  Oh right.  Never read the book.  (Or in this case, even watched the movie).  Man in the middle.  That’s me.

Care for a cartoon, while I ratiocinate?