The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: The Dark History Behind The Maltese Falcon and the Birth of Film Noir (Preview)
Reviewed by J. E. Smyth

In the early 1930s, Humphrey Bogart wasn’t all that different from other American men of his generation—he was out of a job, counting his spare change, and trying to make rent. He was aging out of the romantic juvenile roles he’d hated playing on the stage since his Broadway debut in 1921, and a brief stint in Hollywood had done nothing for his career. But the story goes that when he contemplated spending his meager daily food allowance, he didn’t buy a can of beans or a donut to go with his black coffee. Instead, he’d skip lunch and abstain until 6:00 p.m., when, wearing his best suit, he’d walk over to the 21 Club. Comfortably ensconced in a booth, he’d sit in peaceful luxury with a good martini. 

A few years later, his luck seemed to change. After a Broadway success in Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest, his co-star Leslie Howard told Warner Bros. he wouldn’t make the film version without Bogart. Back in the city of persistent sunshine and empty executive suits, Bogart continued to wear his impeccably cut but now threadbare overcoat, drive a second-hand car, and rent a nondescript place to live. When asked by his few friends (mostly ex-New York writers and actors) why he didn’t spend more of his salary and accept the Hollywood lifestyle, he replied that he was socking away as much of his money as possible for the moment he was fired and could go back to New York. Being an intelligent man, Bogart didn’t trust his boss Jack Warner to nurture his career with good roles when James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, George Raft, and Paul Muni had studio seniority to play the tough guys. So he saved most of his salary as a “Fuck You Fund” for that day when he could no longer stand being surrounded by idiots with big offices and tiny brains. For Bogart, power was having enough money to refuse a lousy job. As he used to say, “I never could stand the smugness of people in charge.”  

It was an attitude he shared with Duke Mantee, the ruggedly individualistic gangster of The Petrified Forest—a man based on the Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger. Mantee’s sensational prison escape to the frontiers of Arizona linked narratives about Western heroes and gunmen from Jesse James to modern times. The Great Depression had killed most people’s faith in the regenerative economic powers of the West; heroic frontiersmen had become dirt-poor migrants and there were no more empty spaces in which to hide from the police. Men like Dillinger were loved for robbing banks at a time when businessmen were foreclosing on family farms. Early in 1936, audiences were thrilled by Bogart’s three-day stubble, baleful glare, and the machine gun he cradled in his lap for most of the film’s running time. As Leslie Howard’s tramp philosopher Alan Squire points out, Mantee had a kind of nobility and a love of pure freedom—even when his back was to the wall—that the rest of us had lost. He was a relic from a heroic age—and, unlike the bouncy, misogynistic thugs played by his friend Cagney, Bogart’s Mantee was haunted by the past and doomed by romantic loyalty to his girlfriend.

But Jack Warner had no interest in developing Bogart as a star, and the actor drifted through the remainder of the 1930s playing mostly two-bit racketeers and gunmen. When he finally found another role he liked, the protagonist of Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941), based on a novel by W. R. Burnett, the connections to Mantee and Dillinger couldn’t have been more obvious. Roy Earle was “the last of the Dillinger gang”—recently sprung from prison to mastermind the heist of a resort hotel out west in the Sierras. High Sierra was the first of several collaborations between Bogart and then-screenwriter John Huston. The film was such an unexpected success with audiences in the first few months of 1941 that Warner Bros. gave Bogart star billing on his next assignment (after George Raft refused the role) and promoted Huston to direct it. It was a remake—the studio’s third attempt to make a decent adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, serialized in Black Mask magazine from September 1929 and published by Knopf in 1930. The story of a San Francisco private investigator’s encounter with a gang of crooks competing for ownership of a sixteenth-century statuette has remained one of the most popular crime novels of all time. The film, beloved by many as Bogart’s finest piece of work, turns eighty this October…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 4