Welcome to "Saturday Night At The Movies.

I'm your host, Glen Holland.

Tonight's film is the classic crime drama, "The Maltese Falcon", directed by John Houston, who also adapted the screenplay from the 1930 novel by Dashiell Hammett.

The film Stars Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, with Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Lee Patrick and Elisha Cook Jr.

Critic Richard T. Jameson called it, "The most triumphantly well cast movie from Hollywood's Golden Age, rivaled only by "Casa Blanca"."

The film begins in the offices of detective Sam Spade and his partner, Miles Archer.

A young woman, Ruth Wonderly, wants help locating her sister, who she says is involved with a man named Floyd Thursby.

Although he and Spade are skeptical about her story, Archer agrees to follow Thursby.

Early the next morning, Spade receives a call from the police, telling him Archer has been killed.

After visiting the scene, Spade tries to contact Ms. Wonderly, but discovers she has checked out of her hotel.

Two police detectives grill Spade at his apartment, and tell him Floyd Thursby has also been killed.

They suspect Spade of the murder.

Spade again meets his client, who now calls herself Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

She says Thursby was in fact her partner, and she suspects he shot Archer, although she doesn't know who killed Thursby.

Spade doesn't trust her, but he agrees to investigate the murders.

Back at his office, Spade encounters Joel Cairo, a mysterious man who offers him $5,000 to find a black figure of a bird.

When Spade later tells O'Shaughnessy about Cairo, it becomes clear the two know each other.

They also know, and fear, the "Fat Man", who is also in San Francisco, and also anxious to get his hands on the black bird.

Although the 1941 version of ""The Maltese Falcon" was the third film based on Hammett's novel, it was otherwise a collection of firsts.

""The Maltese Falcon"" was John Houston's directorial debut, and the first film to feature longtime stage actor, Sydney Greenstreet.

The leading role of Sam Spade was the first to present the star persona that would define Humphrey Bogart's characters for the rest of his career.

And critics generally consider the "Maltese Falcon to be the first film noir with its pervading sense of corruption, shifting loyalties, shady characters, dark streets and a femme fatal who tempts the hero to do what his good sense tells him he shouldn't.

Dashielle Hammett was best known in Hollywood for "The Thin Man," published in 1934.

Hammett's novel was brisk and witty, and William Powell and Myrna Loy as the detective couple, Nick and Nora Charles, endeared themselves to movie audiences over a series of six "Thin Man" films.

But "The Thin Man" was never meant to be anything other than an agreeable entertainment.

Hammet's other novels like "The Dain Curse," the basis for films in 1935 and 1942, were much darker.

Hammett was the best representative of a group of popular mystery writers sometimes known as the "Black Mask Boys" after the pulp crime magazine that published their work.

Hammett's detective stories were a direct challenge to the gentile mysteries of the British crime school, best exemplified by the work of Agatha Christie.

As Raymond Chandler, himself the creator of detective Philip Marlow wrote in "The Simple Art of Murder," "Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley back to the kind of people that committed for reasons not just to provide a corpse.

He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for the purpose.

That language was taught and spare.

Unadorned.

Chandler compares it to the language in Earnest Hemingway's stories and novels.

"Yet, for all I know," Chandler adds, "Hemingway may have learned something from Hammett".

Dashielle Hammett wrote from experience.

He worked for a time as a private investigator for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco, the location of "The Maltese Falcon".

Some of the characters in the novel were based on real people, but not the character of Sam Spade.

Hammett said, "Spade has no original.

He is a dream man, in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and in their cockier moments, thought they approached."

The first film adaptation of "The Maltese Falcon" was released with that title in 1931.

The film stared BB Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, and had a lighter tone and looser pacing than the 1941 version.

It also included sexually suggestive situations.

Its Spade was a real ladies man, and many overt references to homosexuality.

After the motion picture production code was put into effect in 1934, movies could no longer include that sort of material.

And the 1931 version of "The Maltese Falcon" was unseen in the United States for three decades.

In 1966, the film was made available for television under a new title, Dangerous Female.

The 1941 version supposedly eliminated the sexual situations and the references to homosexuality, but in fact, both remain, albeit in more subtle forms.

A second, much looser adaptation of Hammett's novel was released in 1936, under the title "Satan Met A Lady".

It starred Betty Davis and Warren William as a detective now called Ted Shane.

This attempt at a lighthearted caper film was a disaster.

Bosley Crauther of the New York Times wrote, "There is no story, merely a farrago of nonsense, representing a series of practical studio compromises with an unworkable script.

It's the kind of mistake over which the considerate and discreet thing is to draw the veil of silence."

Betty Davis herself later dismissed "Satan Met A Lady" as junk.

John Houston hated both of these attempts to make a film of "The Maltese Falcon".

He was especially annoyed by the happy endings Warner Brothers had tacked on to the two earlier films.

Houston's screenplay, like the 1931 version, followed the plot of the novel very closely.

It left out only a very few of the book scenes.

It took most of its dialogue directly from the novel.

Like Hammet, Houston put Spade right at the center of the action.

Many scenes in the film are shot over Spade's shoulder, allowing the audience to share his point of view.

Spade in fact, appears in every scene of the film, except the murder of Miles Archer.

And that scene was added only because the studio insisted on it.

He shot the film in sequence, except for the exterior shots, allowing his cast to build tension organically as the story progressed.

Despite a culture of pranks on the set, and heavy drinking among the cast after the day's shooting, Houston brought his production in two days ahead of schedule and $54,000 under budget.

For some of its stars, the film was the beginning of long term friendships.

Humphrey Bogart would go on to work with John Houston again in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "Key Largo", both in 1948, and "The African Queen" in 1951, among other films.

He also starred again with Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in "Casa Blanca" in 1942, and "Passage to Marseille" in 1944.

Bogart said of the Maltese Falcon, "It was practically a masterpiece.

I don't have many things I'm proud of, but that's one."

"The Maltese Falcon" was also Peter Lorre's favorite of his films.

He made nine more movies with Sydney Greenstreet, including "The Mask of Demetrius" in 1944, and "Three Strangers" in 1946.

The black bird at the center of "The Maltese Falcon" isn't called that until Guttman says near the end, "If you lose a son, it's possible to get another.

There's only one Maltese falcon."

It's true that the Grand Master of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem had to pay an annual tribute to the Holy Roman emperor, Charles the Fifth, for granting his order, The Island of Malta.

And the tribute, due on All Saints Day, was indeed one falcon, but, a live falcon.

Hammett invented the idea of the golden jeweled statuette.

There were several 11 and a half inch tall falcon statuettes made for use in the film.

Some were made of plastic resin, and some were lead, depending on what the statuette was used for in a given scene.

At least three of the original statuettes still exist.

They're conservatively valued at over one million dollars, each.

This means, they're the most valuable movie props ever made.

That, each one is now worth more than three times what it cost to make "The Maltese Falcon" in 1941.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night At The Movies."

I'm Glen Holland.

Goodnight.