Required Viewing 07: The Maltese Falcon

We're in Wayne Media. We're in Wayne. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Required Viewing, a sub-feed podcast on the CultureCast feed. I am your host, Chris Stash, of the CultureCast, and I'm joined by my two good friends all the way from, well, one of them is always here if it's a Required Viewing episode. He's the co-host of this show.

He's a professor over at Texas Tech, your friend and mine, Dr. David D. Perlmutter. Howdy, Chris and Mike. I noticed that if we had put a different letter in the center, I would be having to talk to the man who wrote 17 books as opposed to you, the man who's been on The Daily Show.

So the letter does matter, as you've pointed out. Also joining us for the first time on this sub feed show, but Mike and I have worked together. countless times. I should go in and have my AI assistant tell me how many hours you and I have recorded together. It would probably be a lot. He's the host of the Projection Booth, a movie podcast that if you're not listening to it already, you should be.

Mike White. When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it. On this episode of Required Viewing, we are going to be talking about a film from 1941. that is so important it's been put in the National Film Registry, which means it's a good film. Whether or not we resonate with it is almost unimportant at this point because it's been deemed a film so important it deserves to be maintained in a registry of films in the Library of Congress, which does a very good job at preserving the films that they've deemed important. But that film is 1941's The Maltese Falcon.

So the film is directed by John Huston on a screenplay by John Huston, and it is based on The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Its reputation precedes it, obviously, given who stars in the film. Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Gladys George, Barton MacLean, Lee Patrick, and Sidney Greenstreet. It does adapt the book of the same name, which is about... Detective Sam Spade, who takes a case from a mysterious woman, loses his partner to a gunman the same night, and is pulled into a deadly competition among three criminals hunting a jewel-encrusted MacGuffin.

I mean, statuette. I am going to kick it to you, Mike, first, because this was an invitation out of the blue, as I like to do. But I knew that an opportunity to talk about a film like this one would not be passed up by such a film scholar as yourself. So tell me a little bit about your thoughts on the Maltese Falcon. Oh, gosh, I love the Maltese Falcon.

I saw it the first time when I was in college. I went to one of the film society screenings that they had on campus every weekend and saw this for the first time. A lot of it I was already familiar with just because it was so much part of the culture. This would have been early 90s. But by that time, Ren and Stimpy was a real big thing.

So when Peter Lorre starts slapping Sidney Greenstreet or yelling at Sidney Greenstreet that he's a bloated idiot, I was just like, okay, now I know where Ren got all this from. And again, I don't think that was the first time I saw Peter Lorre, but it just resonated with me so much. I really love him. I love Greenstreet. I love Elijah Cook Jr.

Just all of these performances and I was just so thrilled when you invited me to be on here because I just needed another excuse to see this movie. And I watched it over the weekend. I had some friends. We were all together and I was just like, OK, we're going to watch Maltese Falcon. I know that they hadn't seen it.

And it was great hearing the laughs, the feeling, the tension, because this movie really, you know, it's a great detective story, but it's also very, very funny. And it is so well done, so well shot. There are a couple moments of the film that are little mistakes. And I would almost like to write a paper or something to talk about those mistakes in the film. There's a couple of rough edits and there's one ADR later on in the film that drives me nuts.

But otherwise, I think this is as close to a perfect detective story as you could possibly get. Professor, same question to you. Well, Chris, we've talked sometimes about how the reputation of a film or a television show or a painting or a video game, whatever, a novel, can get in the way of appreciating it. And I remember encountering this film in high school where our teacher was in English class, but he really loved to show us movies that were adaptations of novels and then obviously have us read the novel. So we were reading the novel and he showed us the movie.

And I felt at the time with my very, very early sense of how you approach a class and introduce something, he was saying, you are about to see The greatest detective movie ever made. You're going to see the greatest film noir ever made. You're going to see one of the amazing classics of the cinema. Now, you might imagine I was going to an all boys school, by the way. So you might imagine like 12 year old boys.

Our instinct was to hate it whenever it's sold that heavily. They're like, you're going to love this. Hey, kids, this is going to be amazing. You're going to have the greatest experience of your life against all odds and against our. 12 year old boy instincts.

We love this movie. I mean, we, we, we appreciate it. We, we saw it like, yeah, it was black and white, but in the seventies, we were only like maybe a decade away from television being all black and white. You know, is this the twilight zone in the early sixties? There people, people I knew still had black and white TVs.

Uh, most movies were color. So it wasn't as mad massive a transition today for, uh, 12-year-old boys who grew up on Minecraft watching this movie. So there's some issues there we'll talk about. But I just remember 12-year-old me and my 12-year-old friends going like, wow, what clever dialogue. I mean, I don't think we used that phrase exactly, but that was snappy.

And we repeated, including the phrase that you just used. Now, remember, Now, in other words, let me go even further, talk about cinematic influence. This film caused violence on the playground. For at least a month afterwards, several of us would slap each other out of nowhere. And we were friends, right?

This wasn't in 1977. This didn't count as bullying, 78. We'd slap each other and go, you'll take it and you'll... So that's the power of cinema. But my point was.

That, yeah, this is a film. that I. Think that multiple audiences, no matter what the cultural gap is, the generational gap, the actual modality gap of black and white people, this entire movie is people having meetings in rooms, right? There is no 25-minute car chase. Sam Spade never jumps on top of a train. and fights Nazis. There's nothing that would be within the instinct to add into the detective thriller on a bigger budget today.

But it's always entertaining because you've got this amazing dialogue, these characters that are on the list of best character actors in the history of television, movies, and beyond. Sidney Greenstreet, in his film debut... And you're going, this is a 61-year-old man. He was so iconic. He was in so many movies, Casablanca coming up, right, playing Sidney Greenstreet.

He was one of those character actors that he played himself. But, man, we love to see himself. The film, the work there, and John Huston has credited– Other people like this was his debut as well. And he has said this was not like some great auteur thing. Like I really was heavily influenced by some great Arthur Edison.

A.D. said A.D. son was a very great classical Hollywood cinematographer. And Alfred Adolf Deutsch did the score. So this was like a really good team. It was like a lightning bolt struck. And you had just all of these.

Faceted diamond elements, and it just came together into these royal jewels of filmmaking. That said, I have shown this film. I've filmed parts of this film to students, and I've talked about it. I think that they do appreciate it in 2026. as much. I just wouldn't have the buildup of, like, you're about to watch the greatest movie ever made.

Can we say that this is a remake or another adaptation that they had just done, Satan Met a Lady, in 1936, which was based on the same book from 1929? Yeah. people would be losing their minds if it was, oh, we put out this movie five years later, we're doing another version of it. It's like, you know, the internet would go crazy. Like, oh, what are they doing? It was just five years ago that they did this.

They're casting Ben Affleck as Batman. I mean, that's the modern day equivalent now, right? Yeah. Oh, it's a black Johnny Storm. You know, just outrage, fan outrage.

Outrage. And there was another one too, right? Like the Maltese Falcon came out in 1931. So there was a, it was like, that was a very odd. And there's a story about that, but we won't get to now, but I'm glad they did it.

Oh God. Yeah. When people rail against remakes, I always have to say the Maltese Falcon was remake, you know, like get, get over yourself. Like, yeah, there are a lot of bad remakes out there, but there's some also very good ones. And this is like the example for me.

Well, and I also think it speaks to, because, and this is kind of, you know, the thing that I was finding in my research about the film is John Huston, obviously, like, not every director who directs their first film does what he did, where he's storyboarding every scene and shot-by-shot instructions are in the script for the film. Like, that, you know, I like to drag on Ridley Scott, because I think Ridley Scott is one of those directors who's kind of just. Not past his usefulness, but it's like every time he says something, it's seemingly there's a more than 50% chance that he's going to put his foot in his mouth at this point. And also the movies that he makes, it feels like a better than 75% chance that his film's not even going to be good.

And then he'll disavow it after the fact and blame the actors, which is just wild. But the thing I've always appreciated about Ridley Scott is when you hear him talk about what he does, he storyboards everything, which is just mental. I mean, genuinely mental. Because Houston doing this for this film, that's a big deal given that it's, you know, it's his debut film. And, you know, we already mentioned that.

But the fact that he did that for his first film is wild. Because again, and I think you've both already mentioned this, the snappiness and kind of the quick pace of the film and the back and forth of the film, it would not have worked without it being so methodically planned out. Because this has to work together in a way that is seamless in terms of the way the cogs fit together and interplay. Because like you both have already mentioned, It's a film that is remade two times now, right? Twice, we're saying this is the third remake.

And the reason this one works is seemingly because they left a lot of the dialogue from Dashiell Hammett in the movie. The other two aren't doing that, and that seems to be a problem because– and I would go as far as to say this, and this might seem hyperbolic– but when you have something like this that has the snappy dialogue and the kind of specific dialogue of Dashiell Hammett– It's like someone taking Shakespeare and trying to adapt a soliloquy in Hamlet. It's like, what are you doing? It's perfect the way it's written. Don't try to do anything else, regardless of when you're setting it.

I mean, I think of that Ethan Hawke Hamlet film where he's even doing that soliloquy as it's written in that movie. They're not trying to update it for the most part. And it's like, you know what? Sometimes the way things are written is the best way and you don't actually have to do much. And I think John Huston understood that and realized that, which is very important for a director because not all directors are like that, especially a director who's writing and directing his first film.

Right. And the story used to be that Houston would tell apocryphal because he loved apocryphal stories. But, oh, I just took the book and had my secretary just transcribe it. And that's how we wrote the script, you know, like basically reinterpret the paperback version of it into a screenplay. Definitely not true.

I mean, there are a lot of missing parts to the Maltese Falcon. There's this great scene. section in there called the flintcraft story that i really like a lot but i mean it is very faithful to the book for the most part if not in the exact words the spirit and yeah that dialogue the dialogue is just amazing i mean yes so many quotable lines i i was thinking about the one where uh Humphrey Bogart says, do you want me to learn how to stutter? I mean, there's just so much just like, yeah, like just throws him off. And you want to be Humphrey Bogart as you're watching this movie. You're just like, this is the coolest guy I have ever seen.

And even when he loses his cool at one point, you see him walk out of this room where he is just like thrown a fit. And then you see the smile on his face. You realize like, oh, he's just acting. And for me, and I don't want to jump too far ahead, but for me, that's what this movie is all about. You know, you've got these, let's call them four main actors in this film.

And really, I would say that so much of it is about three actors. It's about Green Street, Laurie and Astor. And them giving these performances to each other, but also to Sam Spade. There is a moment where literally Humphrey Bogart sits down and you see him from behind. And he's watching, I think, Green Street give this performance.

I can't remember if it's Green Street or not. But basically, it might have even been when all three of them were in his apartment. Basically, he is the audience. And he's just watching these three play things out, trying to figure out what's true, what's not. But he is so much our surrogate for us being there.

And he even does this whole stage setting thing where he goes around, he'll turn on all the lights in the apartment. It's like he's getting the stage ready for these three to come in and give this performance. And then he's almost like the theater critic, just judging the performance. I mean, he does that quite a few times where like, you know, Mary Astor will start to break down. He's just like, you're good.

Yeah. Just like just telling her, like, I know what you're up to. You can't fool me, but you are a really good actress. The essay that. my middle school teacher assigned for us to read is the same one that I assigned to read. And today, of course, a lot of people know that the other one of the two twin towers of Los Angeles detective writing was Raymond Chandler and his character, Philip Marlowe.

And Chandler wrote a famous essay called The Simple Art of Murder, which is like the required reading if you're trying to appreciate murder. Detective fiction from the very beginning, but certainly the film noir, the one set in the 30s, 40s, 50s, whether it's on screen or written. And he actually credits as St. Dashiell Hammett is number one. He's much better than me.

He talks about Sam Spade, but he specifically talks about dialogue. And it's funny because we are connecting to the question of adaptation. I've mentioned before on this show, Mike, I am not a Brandon Sanderson fan in the sense that I've read a couple of his books and they just weren't for me. But he seems like a pretty thoughtful guy. He's created his own billion-dollar book company.

And he seems pretty intelligent about his own craft. And he was giving an interview once where he was talking about talking to a room full of writers in Hollywood who were adapting another work. And they were saying, like, yeah, we want to we want to put our own imprint on this. And he asked a very good question. He said.

You're adapting a work that sold 50 million copies. Maybe you should look at that one first before you put your own imprint. Maybe the dialogue from there is useful. Maybe the sequence of plot is useful. So I understand because I've been watching it all this time.

Adaptation is change. But I think what you're saying, both of you, is this one lesson that required viewing we can take away is that when the original has material that still works, that's beautiful, that's gem perfect. Don't suppress it just because you want to put your name on it or necessarily even adapt it for modernity, because some of these things still work, especially if it's set in a certain time. I mean, yeah, OK, if we were to do somebody tomorrow, greenlit, I don't know, Mel Gibson in the Maltese Falcon 2026. Yeah, they're going to have to change something, some things and dialogue, some dialogue and some scenes.

But this captured the moment and there was no reason to change. Yes, I agree that there was a reason There was a daughter of, I believe, Cindy Greenstreet's character that was dropped from from the book. There's this list of things. But they were they were really inconsequential to telling a fast paced plot in a movie theater. Also a plot, as I mentioned earlier, a plot that doesn't really have that much action that could have been a stage play with just a few more changes of backdrop, but still just hurdles along because of the acting and the dialogue, the setting, things like that.

So I just– I think a takeaway is– Look at the source material and make a real thoughtful decision about whether you're going to lose or gain something by losing or gaining something. Yeah, thinking about it, there are so few exterior shots. This is very much like you're saying, a film about people having conversations in rooms and who gets what information when, who knows what, when. But you get very few shots like Sam's partner being shot or when he's Sam's voiding his tail, when you've got Wilmer following. And it took me a long time to realize that his name is Wilmer rather than Wilma, just because of the way that Sydney Green Street says his name.

I think that's. Pretty intentional, especially when Humphrey Bogart keeps calling him a Gunzel, which was basically another name for a sissy, a homosexual, just a way of calling out people. So I think that relationship, too, between Wilmer and Sidney Greenstreet, as well as Maybe Green Street and Laurie. I mean, Laurie is definitely coded to be gay, especially with the whole smell of gardenias on his card. That great little musical flourish when Sam Spade smells the card and his eyebrows go up and you have that little sting of the violins.

So well done. And yeah, I'd like that. You know, it's there, but it's not like it is so in our face. It's more like, OK, if you notice this, you notice this. And that's the code of it all.

I mean, that is. And what's so interesting about that, and I think that that's, you know, an interesting kind of moment to take in this conversation is when restriction produces subtext, which I think is kind of what has happened here, right? Because like you mentioned, Mike, I, you know, I did not know what that term meant. So I looked it up. And after I looked it up, I was like, oh, okay.

I was picking up on it. Because again, Houston does a good job at kind of saying without telling too much. But when you know that that's the case, it's like, okay, so the code didn't allow something like this to be the case. We know this because we've talked about this before. You and I, Mike, was it a couple years ago?

Was it last year, two years ago, three years ago? When was that that we did all those pre-code films? Oh yeah, that was probably like three years ago. It was definitely after we did all those horribly depressing movies that we were talking about during the pandemic. I think we wanted to do- All.

The European sci-fi films. Yeah, that was uplifting times for Mike White March. God, I remember that. I think the pre-code films we did were a lot lighter. Yeah, well, and that's the thing.

I mean, you mentioned it already, like this film is for all, and here's the thing I had never, you know, I've never said on a podcast before, so I'll mention it here. I had never seen this film before. You know, Richard Haddam has turned this off somewhere and he's screaming out into the heavens. And it's, I, I, it's not that I hadn't seen film noir and really I came to LA confidential. I think I've only seen LA confidential in the last five years, which ain't great either in terms of seeing something like that.

Cause that's another great film. I mean, some of the cast members kind of, you know, have, other issues now, but for the most part, that's kind of an unimpeachable film. And this is one of those unimpeachable films as well. I would, I would say like the moment I put this on, like my girlfriend and I were watching it and I was just like, oh, okay, this is the movie where all the other movies came from, from this genre. It's every single thing that's said, seen that we have framed interaction between characters is the best version of it in terms of Yes, this is this maybe isn't, quote, the first.

I mean, High Sierra and Stranger on the third floor, maybe. But this, I think, is more I don't know, like so much of this, I think, has become for maybe some people, maybe not so much anymore. And I think that this shows my age as much as anyone on this podcast episodes age. I don't know how many people know who Humphrey Bogart is now that are younger than me. because I know why people who are my age to y'all's age know who Humphrey Bogart is. And people my age know Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre and Orson Welles, because there's a cartoon that so many people my age saw that literally use their voices for characters.

I mean, Mike already mentioned it, but Orson Welles is just brain from pinky in the brain. I'm literally that, that that's the voice that he's doing. And then Peter Lorre, there's a, Peter Lorre is in Animaniacs as well. And just as recently as Acme versus Coyote, there's a character called Dr. Lorre in that film who looks like Peter Lorre, an animated version of him.

And I don't know if that's still a– when my girlfriend and I were watching that, I was like, who's going to know who that is? I don't know, right? Yeah. Yeah, there's a whole book out there that I've started reading that's all about animated versions of Peter Lorre, because I love those old Warner Brothers cartoons. And of course, he was parodied openly in those, as well as Like you're saying, being the voice, you know, it's like the Peter Lorre voice of the professor who's going, you know, come here, Mr.

Bunny Rabbit, like those kind of things. Yes, yes. It's like the mad scientist assistant thing. Yes, yes. That's what I think of when I think of Peter Lorre, and I've never even seen a movie with him.

This is the first time I've seen him. Oh, wow. You are welcome to a much larger world, man. He is fantastic. He's one of my favorites.

We overuse, I think, since I've written two books with this word in the title, maybe I overuse the word icon and iconic. But that's when you know you've become iconic, when you are referenced, but people may not know the reference, but the original was so powerful that it resonates through, echoes through eternity, to quote Gladiator. And I've brought up before a couple of times talking about this. There's a great quote from Sir Terry Patchett, this fantasy novelist who wrote this Discworld series, and he was talking about Tolkien and saying Tolkien is what Fuji Mountain was to Japanese art, that it became so common to paint Fuji Mountain that either you were painting Mount Fuji or you were not painting Mount Fuji.

Those were the choices, right? And I think, yeah, so many of the beats, the plot elements, just the dialogue, the aspirational dialogue. Today, I could imagine some young film student is going, OK, for my proof of concept YouTube movie to get me a movie deal, I'm going to do a short detective movie. But they're trying to have snappy dialogue. They're trying to have distinctive characters that really pop out.

They may not know the original text, but they're using motifs, tropes, just every single element because it's seeped through our culture that you can't escape it. It's always going to be there. I hope it will be there 200 years from now. And that's that's probably the greatest testament to the cultural impact. Besides, you know, violence in my schoolyard to to a film, to any object of art is that it's referred to even when the people don't know that they're referring to it.

Are you talking about Ryan Murphy's brick? That's one. Or Brian Murphy? I always screw up this guy's name. No, Ryan Johnson.

Ryan Johnson. Katrina Longwell's husband, Mike. How could you forget? Oh, okay. Longworth.

Longworth. Oh, I forgot. Sorry. In another sphere somewhere, she is upset. Did you guys realize that Boo Berry is Peter Lorre?

Yeah. That, that is Peter Lorre. Cause it's funny. You know, we haven't seen a commercial with him in years, but like when he was on commercials, he definitely had that Lorre voice. Well, he has the eyes too.

I mean, he has the Peter Lorre eyes and that's the, you know, that's the thing for me, obviously that I more so than even the voice is just the look and his eyes. And he's so striking in this movie. And that's, You know, like I've already kind of let the cat out of the bag a little bit with not having seen this before, as the professor leaves. No, it's one of these things where I had never seen this before and I don't know why. And I've also not seen a lot of film noir films either.

And I feel like if I had worked backwards from... LA Confidential to something in the 80s to something in the 60s, this would have been something I would have watched. And the thing that I feel even more kind of put out by is as an adult, this is the first time I've seen a film with Humphrey Bogart in it, which as someone who has now seen it and seen a film with him in it, I think it's okay to say like, as someone who watches a lot of film, I haven't seen some of the most important movies because it's also, by the way, I think it's also, and this is me just kind of not like cancel, cancel, like the term, but more like it's somewhat culturally insensitive to say that the only movies that matter are the ones that were made in the West.

And then it's like, well, you haven't seen the Maltese Falcon, one of the most important films of all time to English speakers. Yes. But I mean, it is obviously transcended boundaries, but at the same time, like, cause, and I know this because of having been on Mike's show, the projection booth so many times, all these other cultures around the world have just as much claim over film as we do, if not more. And it's been much more important in some countries than even our own in terms of moving the needle on things, especially like, I would say like radical discourse around social topics that are being poo-pooed at the time. You know, Mike, there's a lot of stuff I've watched for your show that I'm just like, I would never have watched this, but it speaks to something that's really important for that culture, less specifically ours.

And that's the thing about Maltese Falcon. It is an important film for film noir, which is or is not an American creation. I think it is somewhat, right? I mean, Mike, you can correct me on this, but film noir has its traditions elsewhere, but it is somewhat of an American creation, right? At least the big characters in the genre.

Well, it's funny you're using the term film noir, and obviously you hear the French in there, but Yeah, it was coined by the French, but yes, very much speaking to the American, I can't even say film movement. It was just the way that, especially... For me, my my feelings on film noir is that so much of it comes from the influx of Eastern European immigrants, especially the Germans coming in here. And I mean, you mentioned Stranger on the third floor. I'm trying to remember who the director was of that.

But like, you know, you can you could possibly say, oh, yeah, well, you know, Capo. Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a film noir. You know, it's not. It's an expressionist film, but it's like those expressionist elements, you know, in Stranger on the Third Floor, even in things like I always consider Citizen Kane to be a film noir because it's this investigation of the reporter.

So much of it is told in flashback. You know, you have this whole idea of you know, investigating this person's life. But for me, film noir is, you know, it's really the best films noir for me are the ones that have this desperation to the character where a character is doomed at the beginning and they're even more doomed. They're in a worse place at the end. Sam Spade isn't doomed.

I tend to not think of this as like a film noir in that way. You know, it's just a very, very strong detective story, but It does use those trappings, the shadows. I love the Spade and Archer on the floor at the beginning, and then the way that that changes to Samuel Spade later on, which is kind of a nice... When they decide to repaint the windows, they do it very quickly. They sure do.

Don't they? It's obviously a conversation we should always have about... Culture and you want there should be sensitivity about whether something began and should be credited as starting in a particular culture. And it could be food or it could be a novel or it could be a movie. But I like to think maybe I'm being very old fashioned saying that that great art is. embodies culture, but also transcends culture and belongs to everyone.

Right. So Akira Kurosawa makes Seven Samurai, which is very much embedded in Japanese culture. But that doesn't stop Hollywood from making a perfectly good movie called Magnificent Seven. and taking elements of samurai culture, noticing that, hey, there's a one-to-one match here between cowboy culture, because we're all human, and confrontations between good and evil, between bandits and people who support order and conflicts within groups. In my field of communications, there's a bunch of people who've done studies over the years of TV programs especially that became internationally famous, and let's talk Texas, Dallas. Maybe you two are too young to remember, but there was a television program called Dallas, which was a mega, mega, mega hit in the United States.

It was a mega hit all over the world, to the point where the Dallas crew, Larry Hagman and all, would go on a tour of Jakarta, And they'd show up and 30,000 people would be there screaming, we love you, JR, right? And there are all sorts of stories like that. Now, yeah, we live in a multipolar world now for culture. In fact, I teach a whole class on global communication that I have modules on, like how Bollywood, how the Korean film industry, and Chris and I have done a couple of Korean movies where we're talking about how Korea, this tiny country in terms of population, has become a mega dominant cultural power, especially as you skew into the younger demographics. I mean, You guys are mentioning some cartoons and things, but my students are able to rattle off K-pop, K-drama, K-anime, and then some of the anime and things from other countries around there.

But Korea is a very especially interesting case because they are just so small, and there's so few Korean speakers compared to almost any other language. And does BTS, this amazingly popular group, does that belong only to Korea? So I like to think the film noir, which was sort of a joint project of Hollywood and Western European individuals, but also the Western European film industry, is now a global cultural phenomenon. And You could make a detective movie, all Indonesians in Indonesia, and you'd still be able to sort of reinvent the echoes of this. And I think that's what's wonderful about culture.

It shouldn't be something that separates us. It should be something that brings us together. Absolutely. I mean, some of the best detective novels that were being written, say, 20 years ago were all coming out of Scandinavia. I mean, it's so nice that there's this exchange of ideas and things.

It's like, yeah, they were just killing it. Like you said, South Korea, the cinema there is wild and has been great for so many years. Yes, small market, but just what a a way to kind of dominate world cinema. And yeah, same thing. Like these books, like Hammett's books were published all over the place.

And, you know, like you get to hear those echoes from other corners of the world all over, you know, and, and just, I am going to look up to see just how many other adaptations of his stuff was out there. Cause I know that, Yeah, even one of the very first things that comes up is Monsieur Spade. So it's like, yeah, his stuff definitely has gone around the globe. I'd like to mention two things. One, to speak to something the professor just mentioned and something that you just mentioned, Mike.

South Korea, for me, has now, for me, known as a... purveyor of really well done true crime and dark true crime films that are darker than even American true crime films will get. Like I saw the devil. If you have not seen that movie, good Lord, that movie. I mean, that movie is just, I mean, not like the worst, not in terms of like, it's a bad movie, but it's like, it's a rough watch. I mean, I, we, we can't even mention most of the things that happened in the movie.

A cause I don't want to spoil it, but B because it's like, it's rough. Um, And there are I mean, old boy, there are the chaser like there are so many of these South Korean like crime films that are so well done. It's kind of become a a niche market into itself. But then you mentioned, Mike, the Nordic noir like Yo Nezbo. I mean, what a what a great writer.

Right. You know, something, Mike, you and I have covered a couple of years ago. It was like last year or the year before. Would you consider Stieg Larsson to be noir? I mean, it's like, you know, journalistic investigative.

I mean, they're journalists instead of detectives. So I guess it's trafficking in that. It feels like noir adjacent, I guess. I mean, not every noir has to have an investigation. A lot of them do, whether it's an external or an internal investigation.

But where there are investigations, that's where I always enjoy seeing the different investigators. You know, it doesn't have to be the private detective. It can be, you know, last night I talked about Phantom Lady, the Robert Shadmack film. it's the you know, the secretary of the guy who's accused of murder is the one that goes out and actually solves the crime. The police, like Thomas Gomez, the police detective in that is just like, yeah, I didn't do that great of a job. You know, it seemed like such a crazy story.

But, you know, like, I'll be here if you need me, little lady, for you to go investigate the crime. It's great when we have not just detectives investigating stuff. And that's so much of what these films are. And also the aspect of that the detective is not just this shiny silver steel perfect. Oh, yeah.

Upholder of truth and justice that they have. Let's talk about this film in particular. We have our protagonist, Sam Spade. Immediately, we find out he's having an. Affair with his partner's wife.

Yes. Yeah. So his partner's wife. Yeah. And the ultimate betrayal.

Right. Within within any culture, it's hard to think of a culture where that would not be a betrayal of somebody that you're in business with, that you're having an affair. The partner is killed. And this is where I want to bring up. And this is this is a question for you two young guys there, because.

One of my instincts, which sometimes I think is helpful and sometimes I think gets in the way of my own appreciation of a film or or maybe I'm trying to impose something on something that's not there is this film was made when the world was on fire outside those offices. Mm hmm. Eastern Asia was on fire. Japan, China had been fighting. A lot of people say World War II actually began two or three years earlier with Japan's invasion of mainland China.

Horrible, millions dying. Germany was conquering all of Europe, was driving into the Soviet Union and All the smart money was saying, yeah, the Soviet Union is going to collapse and Germany is going to rule the world. Britain was standing alone, pretty much. France had fallen. Battles in Africa, just like the entire world was on fire, except for. the American continent, and we were undecided.

President Roosevelt was extremely cautious. He ran in 1940, just a few years before, on a ticket of, I will keep us out of war. We're not going to get involved in the European war. I promise you. And of course, Japan broke that promise.

But the point was that just outside the windows there of those offices, and those Peter Lorre was in Hollywood, not just because he wanted to make it big in Hollywood, but because he was kicked out of Germany. He was escaping from Germany. And in fact, a lot of the talent of Hollywood in the late 30s and 40s, just like the talent in physics, came from refugees, from Nazism. And when I see a film like Casablanca, I can say, yeah, you know, this is explicitly saying, hey, America, you're not in the war, but the war is knocking at our door and we can't ignore that. We can't ignore our responsibilities to the rest of the world.

This film. Am I over? You tell me that I'm being too professorish. I see something here in Sam Spade's sense of honor and duty that he's got this personal responsibility. challenge. Actually, things sort of worked out.

He's in love with this woman and somebody, not him, killed the husband and now the business is his. Now his lady is his. But he makes it really explicit. My personal life, my personal feelings have to be put on hold. I must do my duty.

I'm not going to let... the death of my partner, go unpunished, unavenged, unsolved. And that's his driving force, is that everybody else is in it for the money, for other reasons, but he wants to do his duty. And I thought that was a little World War II adjacent summer of 1941 there. What did you guys think? Absolutely.

I mean, this is not as... obvious as Rick Blaine I stick my neck out for no one you know representing America and Casablanca and then finally realizes towards the end he has to choose a side as well as Frenchie has to choose a side you know the Claude Rains character but yeah I don't know how much the death of Miles Archer is motivating Sam Spade I mean obviously he's not even interested in is it Effie, the wife, he basically puts her off continuously. And at first it's, you know, you're going to make the cops think that I killed Miles. But I think after a while, it's I'm not interested in you anymore. I don't think there's any feeling that he's going to go back to her. I think it was just a small fling and he's kind of done with her.

I think that whole thing of him at the end saying, like, when a man's partner is killed, you have to do something like, yeah, that's great. But I think it's kind of an afterthought, because for me, you mentioned Seven Samurai earlier, and I was thinking of another Kurosawa film while I was watching this, which is Yojimbo, and how Yojimbo will constantly be fleecing either side of the battle that's going on in the city that he's in, the town that he's in, where he's just like, well, I'm going to need this many yen to go over to do this, and I'm going to need this much from you guys to do this. He's constantly getting money out of these people. It's like, okay, well, takes $ 100 from Miss Wonderly at the beginning.

And then you've got like, you know, he comes in later. He's like, how much money do you have? And she's like, oh, I just have a few hundred dollars. And he's like, okay, I'll take that. And then she holds back a hundred bucks.

But he's like, no, no. You know, go sell your furs. I need that 100 bucks. You know, and he just keeps taking money from people constantly. He takes money from Gutman.

He takes money from Joel Cairo, you know, like just always getting money. So it feels to me like that's his primary motivator. I really think that, yes, I know that our detectors are supposed to be these kind of knight errant, you know, like they have this quest. They have to have this code, you know, Chandler always talks about the code of the detective. I see it being almost an afterthought, but I could easily be swayed out of that.

I just don't see Sam Spade as being like, you know, loyalty, honor first, money second. It feels much more the other way. You know, I, again, as this having been only, you know, I watched it several times for this episode, but effectively the first time I've ever talked about this film, to put it in the context of World War II. It's almost, it's almost tailor-made to have that like kind of, Because because like not half of the characters, not half of the characters are foreigners, but one of the I guess two of the three characters are othered or others, which I mean, you know, World War Two, obviously, the fear of the other has been trafficked in so much sense that, you know, for a time there, it was Indiana Jones fights the Nazis and then Indiana Jones fights the Russians because, you know, the fear of the foreigner, of the unknown or the other I think is so motivating, especially in the media of the times, you know, to speak to Peter Lorre, obviously he's, he's Hungarian, but you know, he could play the sinister foreigner, I think is what Wikipedia calls it.

The, he was typecast as the sinister foreigner. Like, yeah, I bet he was. Because again, I think we were talking about this recently, like there are actors that just like, we need someone to play a cop. And this guy has been playing a cop his entire career. Like, okay, Peter Lorre, that was part of what he did and he did so well.

And so, and then, you know, to speak to the Elijah Cook Jr. of it all, again, the othering of his character being referred to as Gunsel over and over again. And Gutman, I mean, again, Gutman is maybe the one that I. That's the one where I can't say it's like a one to one, but I would say if you're looking at it from a Sam Spade is a character that has to hold himself to a higher honor. Because of the people that have been attacked in his life, his partner, he's going to do something to avenge his partner. I could see that as a kind of the American ideals and morals are being held high by Humphrey Bogart, who at the time is a, you know, I mean, he is a I wouldn't say he's like quintessential American actor.

I would say he's a quintessential American actor now, but. But, you know, Humphrey Bogart's not an actor who was immediately famous the moment he became an actor. You know, he was 40 without a leading role. Like, you know, it was 42 by the time he's a star. And that's anyone?

He played the sort of young playboy early on in his career. That's what we see as Humphrey Bogart. It took him decades to establish what Humphrey Bogart was on the screen. Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, I we talked about him in Black Legion where he's xenophobic and thinks that foreigners are taking his job. That's like 1931, I want to say, or he was in what was that Dr. X movie that he was like a mad scientist. He's doing all these things before he starts to really I think when he starts working with like Cagney and Raft and these guys, it's like, OK, he's starting to get that feel. But I know he credited, oh, what is that actor's name?

Leslie. Oh, because he was in, I want to say, was it the Petrified Forest? He basically got Leslie Howard. He got a break from Leslie Howard, or at least that's how Bogart perceived it. And I think he even named his son Leslie in honor of him because he's just so grateful for that role.

I mean, sounds like, yeah, he put in a lot of hours before he became the person that we now know as Humphrey Bogart. And then when he came into it, he was pretty prepped for it. You know, it's that whole like, you know, luck is where opportunity meets. Preparedness. He was prepared for this.

And he's got that great thing that he does with his teeth, you know, where people say he's pulling up his dentures kind of thing. I love when he does that in this movie and he knows exactly when to do that little tick thing. And that's the thing about Humphrey Bogart for me that, again, to speak back to having not seen him in anything, he does kind of exemplify American idealism of like we're always going to do the right thing and we're going to hold ourselves to a higher standard and we're going to do– What's right, even if it's hard, even if it's the hard thing to do, because, again, by the end of the movie, you know, Sam Spade, I think, makes I don't think it's a difficult decision given the way he's been treated in the film by all of these people.

But I do think, you know, it's one of those like other people would not have taken that decision and done it. And other less less. less moralistic people you know less moralistically high ground and that's the thing about sam spade that uh i could see where you're coming from professor in terms of that being a comparative and again you know it is one of those things where there are enough others or other ish characters in a lot of the proceedings you know two-thirds of the characters in the film that uh I could see that. I will say, though, and again, as someone who's not seen a lot of Humphrey Bogart things, I think I've seen this and then Treasure of the Sierra Madre when I was a child. Humphrey Bogart.

Such a good film. Humphrey Bogart's just so, you can't take your eyes off of him, but man, it feels like he was made for this genre of film. specifically. When I'm watching this film, I'm not saying he wasn't a talented actor, but how was this not the thing that he was just doing all the time? It feels like he's just tailor-made for that, like, I'm going to talk through my teeth and I'm going to hold my jaw a certain way. There were other actors who could have done this role.

I know that what Humphrey Bogart had been offered the role from three different productions, this being the third one that another actor had turned down. George Raft had turned down three separate roles that all went to Humphrey Bogart, and this was the third one. And I don't know what he would have provided to this role that Humphrey Bogart obviously embodied. But Humphrey Bogart just, even though it's nothing like the character in the book, like at all, he looks nothing like him at all. It's just...

Humphrey Bogart, when you you just can't take your eyes off of him. Like, you just can't take your eyes off him at all. I just he's he's mesmerizing because, again, like he's so quintessential in what he is and iconoclastic and what he is specifically that same with Peter Lorre, like. he's, he is, was showing up in Animaniacs cartoons. Like he was showing up, he shows up in things. Wasn't there like a Zales commercial with Humphrey Bogart in at one point, like long after he's dead, there's a Zales commercial with like CGI Humphrey Bogart.

And that was like one of the first examples of that ever even happening. Like he's iconic in the same way that Peter Lorre is. And I think that a lot of that comes from this movie and Casablanca I'm assuming, but yeah, I don't know if Casablanca exists without the success of him in this movie. No, and Casablanca is such a great reunion of Laurie, Green Street, and Bogart all back together again. And those guys would come back together a few times.

And then after a while, Green Street and Laurie made, I want to say, at least three or four films together after this one. So it's like they became... they're a great coupling, but I just wanted to say like, as you see those guys leave Sam Spade's apartment at the end where they're just like, okay, you know, we got fooled this time, but the bird is still out there. Let's go after it. I'm sure somebody has already done this, but I'm just like, I would love to know the continuing adventures of Casper Gutman and Joel Cairo. Like once they leave, it's like, I want to follow them out of this apartment and just go on that next adventure with them because those two guys together, the chemistry, but also just that Mutt and Jeff size difference.

I mean, Gutman is not that huge when you actually look at him, but they portray him as being huge, especially when you see him talking for the first time and they've got that great low angle on him. And he's just like. yes sir i like a man who likes to talk like this whole thing that he's doing it's like he looks huge he's dominating the entire screen with that shot and it's such a brilliant thing that houston is doing with that and i love that. His character's name a couple of times they they love to low angle oh yeah uh Sydney Greenstreet and high-angle Peter Lorre. And you're absolutely right. And it's a reminder, and this is where I get to be, I guess, a cranky old man here sometimes, is that I feel, and again, I want to hear your guys' opinion, that the idea of the distinctive... amazing character actor who always plays the same character coming on the screen and the audience just lighting up, oh, there's Peter Lorre.

Oh, man, this is going to be so good. Sidney Greenstein, Claude Rains, Jack Cassidy, George Sanders. There were these actors who had these such gem-perfect personalities. I remember an old Hollywood story that some agent in Hollywood's after Claude Rains died, somebody said, well, we're never going to be able to cast the Claude Rains role anymore. We'll have to get a team.

And I don't think they used that phrase then, but we'll have to get a team who Claude Rains to, you know, to be the, the charming rogue rascal, you know, authority figure who's slightly evil, but you know, redeems himself or something like that. And I, I, we certainly have very good character actors today and, But it doesn't seem as much– it seems to be more one-off. Like I was talking with somebody about the career of Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute in The Office. And like he was very good as this odd character, interesting, funny, crazy character in The Office. And then he– his whatever career reminders tried to do it again. like in the detective series.

And I, he had, I think two or three series that just didn't go anywhere. Um, And I wonder whether it was the fact that you probably wouldn't want to follow these quirky odd characters for an entire series where they're on the screen by themselves as a lead character, or whether it's just that some quirky odd characters just don't translate into other properties. You tell me, is this something we're missing in Hollywood or there's just hundreds of them and I'm not watching it? No, I think we're definitely missing the faces. I was just talking with, not to name drop, but I was having a conversation with Alicia Malone from TCM recently, and we were just talking about the lack of great faces.

You know, you've got your, you know, like John Goodman, Totoro, I guess it's all people that the Coen brothers have to work with. Are you just mentioning the cast of The Big Lebowski now? Exactly. And of course, Steve Buscemi. Like Steve Buscemi is probably as close to Peter Lorre as we get these days.

You know, Isn't he going to play in the Peter Lorre story? If not, he should. Right. I mean, if he could do the voice and that's that's the last bit of it, because he could do the rest of it. But I mean, Peter Lorre in this movie for me is actually very, very handsome.

I think this is one of the best looking Peter Lorre's other than he directed a film called The Lost One. And he looks really good in that. That's a few years after this one. Great kind of post-Nazi film. Uh, but yeah, I, I, I think that we are missing the character actors that we used to have in the past, not to sound like, you know, old man, uh, yells a cloud kind of thing, but it's just like, you know, you don't have like a, even that when it comes to your leading men, it's like, you don't have a John Garfield.

You don't have these guys who look like they've lived a life. Like you occasionally might get like, um, A Russell Crowe where it's like, OK, he looks pretty rough around the edges, but I think that's all of his own doing, whereas somebody like a Garfield or some of these. other early actors, a Paul Mooney, they looked like they had life on their face. I love George Clooney, but it's like, hey, He's kind of a pretty boy. He doesn't ever look like he's had a rough day in his life. Maybe he can try to do that on screen, but it looks like he's lived a pampered life and it feels like these old, you know, what Alicia said, we used to have faces, you know, like these are faces.

These are faces that I love to see faces that I love to see 40 feet high on screen, because you can see just the life that they have lived on those faces. Well, that's the sunset Boulevard, you know, we used to have faces and that is something. And now, and this is the question here, because when we usually, and when in sunset Boulevard, what she was talking about, when she said, you know, we used to have faces is, The stars, like the radiant, the Mary Pickford's, you know, and my old Barrymore's and like the you wanted. And we Chris and I just did the Eiger sanction with and we talked a lot about this with Clint Eastwood. It's like Clint Eastwood, 50 feet by 50 feet face face.

That was good. That worked. You wanted to see that. He was a star. You wanted to see him grimace and wink and grind his teeth and say something witty.

And you could cut from the Eiger Mountain to his mountain, his face. And we would even accept someone like Charles Bronson, you know, who famously had a face like an eroded cliff and himself. And that was OK, 50 feet tall. But we're saying that what added to the making of a great movie was we had these character actors to just and again, somebody just has to go back and look at Casablanca and look at all the pairings of Green Street and Laurie and see. I don't have like research evidence for this, but I I bet.

And I actually I you know, you could just talk to your if anybody's got living grandparents. But I remember talking to my parents that, oh, yeah, Peter Lorre, you know, like the same joy upon seeing the star you'd have over somebody who had maybe 10 lines in the whole movie. And I think that's just this missing building block of great movies and TV series today. Yeah, absolutely. I just saw Black Angel last two weekends ago, and he's only in that movie for a very brief amount of time.

And surprisingly, he's not a villain. Spoilers. But even though he's just there for two, maybe three scenes, it's like, yes, bring it on. He makes me miss him when he's not on screen. And I think, you know, you're both I would say you're both right.

And I guess, you know, I always I guess the thing I always think of is Harry Dean Stanton was like in his 50s when they filmed Alien. And he looks like he's in his 70s when they're filming that movie. And you guys have already both mentioned these like great character actors who looked like they had lived a life or didn't even look like they should be actors. I think that's the thing that's maybe interesting. harder now to describe and i think it's it's a weirder way of saying it and i don't want to sound dismissive but it's like everybody now that's an actor is expected to look like an actor and at one point you anybody could be an actor because harry dean stanton was an actor because dan hidea was an actor because and i mean we could go back i mean there are so many people that when you think of what they look like there's no universe where they like you said mike should be in a quote, profession that cares about what you look like, unquote, when someone like George Clooney and someone like John Carroll Lynch are working at the same time.

It's so weird because now I think there is that kind of weird expectation of if you're going to be a big star in a big movie, you have to look the part. What that means now is so different than what it used to mean. It's so unfortunate because If you look at this movie, you're like Humphrey Bogart leading man. Like, yes, as we've already all talked about, he looks the part for this kind of movie, but there is kind of a thing where it's like, he's not the leading man for like a lot of other kinds of things though. If you would think about it, obviously he was, but that's because of the success that he was able to have as an actor, because he had gotten to that point in his career without being that guy for a reason, because they, people didn't think he looked the part clearly, even though he had the ability to act like, amongst the best of them, it's like, well, he doesn't have the chiseled jawline and the look of a typical kind of leading man.

And it's like, well, okay, but what does that even mean? And now it's, I wouldn't say it's clearly defined now, but I think now there is kind of this weird lean of like everybody, the lack of like faces is unfortunate because I just, wait, only good looking people want to be actors anymore. Come on. Well, I think that we really gained something when, what is that group? The Steppenwolf theater.

Like when some of those guys left the theater and came to Hollywood. So like, I think the closest we're getting to a really great face is John Malkovich, you know, like he's got a great face. He is a leading man, even though he doesn't necessarily lead like, you know, the big action adventure kind of things that is still more of a George Clooney or, you know, I guess like Clive Owen has a very interesting face as well. I was just about to say Daniel Craig, you know, very, very pretty. But there were pretty actors that were happening in the 40s and 50s as well.

I mean, in the same time that Humphrey Bogart is working, also Burt Lancaster is working, probably one of the more handsome men at the time. So, yeah, we had our share. I don't know if it's just like you know, like I said, old man yells at cloud kind of thing where it's like, okay, yeah, no, we don't have that anymore. Like maybe in 30 years, somebody is going to be recording whatever the next version of a podcast is going. Oh yeah.

Back in the early two thousands, they had great faces. They had great actors. What's going on now in 2040. Everything sucks. Then it'll be me as old man yelling at cloud.

Right. I will be here, but I don't think, I don't think so. I was, I was watching, um, The other day, a modern television series that cost $ 200 million. It's on one of the big streaming networks. And I DNF'd it, as my students would put it, because it was just bad.

It was really just bad. Even I couldn't bring myself to learn something from it. And I was trying to articulate to myself why it was bad, besides, I don't know, bad writing, bad characterization, bad everything. The sets were bad. You know, when the sets are bad, like the stuff that you can just pay somebody to do well, you know, like when the costuming is bad, you know you've got bad.

But part of what was bad was that there were, this was a big cast, and there were four or five young person roles. And maybe it's early onset something, but I had trouble telling them apart. They all were physically the same. You know, they were all young men or young women who had about the same build and like the same look and the same Southern California accent. I mean, just you said it, Mike, about Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet worked together. for among the same reasons that we got Laurel and Hardy, right?

And, and the famous comedy duos and, and, you know, Dean Lewis, Martin and Lewis is that you gotta have physical differences. You gotta be able to on the screen to see that people have to physically be their character, not just be mouth speaking lines. And I, I feel that there, this is something, I mean, we, we don't want to go to the past in order to dump on the present, but like, I think there was a reason that in Homer's Iliad and Homer's Odyssey, he spends considerable time, whoever wrote it, you know, committee or individual or spoke it, sang it first or whatever, spends considerable time distinguishing between the heroes. And in fact, as a memory age, you know, you'll hear like, you know, Hector, this, like Hector is different than Hector.

Ajax is different than Agamemnon. And it seems like a really early poetic storytelling instinct is that you have to have characters that are distinguishable from each other in a memorable way. And I don't think that lesson should be forgotten. I totally agree. Well, and it's just– I think it's a sign of kind of the changing expectations of the industry.

But at the same time, I think it's also a– important reason to, and this sort of speaks to the reason I mentioned it at the top here, that it's so important to preserve film because without film preservation, without the need and want of people involved in the creation of film and the preservation of film, there would be, you know, films don't preserve themselves. That's, you know, that's not how this works. You know, if not for the fact that the film had been preserved so well and that the Library of Congress has decided, you know, since it was 89, it was one of the first 25 films in the National Film Registry. If not for that, there is a chance that this film could have been lost, like so many other things were, and all anyone would remember is how expensive the prop from this movie ended up selling for, which is about as insane of a fact, given that the entire plot of the movie hinges around the fact that, oops, oops, all fake Maltese Falcons, no real ones.

I mean, that's, you know, it ends up being the whole story. I mean, I would I don't this is not where the term MacGuffin comes from, but this film has a pretty famous MacGuffin, obviously. And, you know, as someone who had heard that term so much growing up and then as someone who transitioned into being a film critic and talking about film professionally. like that term gets used a lot, but in this movie, it's like, it is the ultimate MacGuffin in a lot of ways, because it does, it drives the plot along and then it stops mattering, you know, very, very much, very quickly. And then other things matter. And then we get kind of this other list of things and things that happen, but it's so important to keep preserving films like this one and not just, you know, again, just not, it just living on as kind of this weird, you know, apocryphal stories or the prop getting sold.

Because like we've all talked about now, these kinds of actors just don't exist anymore. They're not in plentiful supply like they used to be. Even now, the kinds of character actors that one would hope for, it's just not a thing. It's just they're not existing the way that they used to. And it's unfortunate.

And preserving these films and preserving a film like this one is so important because I think this is at least from what I've seen and what my assumptions are, this is a lot of these actors operating at their absolute highest, absolute best, which, you know, Professor, you and I have talked about competency, and this is like the highest level of competency at every turn. I mean, all of the actors, all the crew, John Houston, you know, most specifically, but there are so many reasons to preserve this film, obviously, but the character actors alone is one of them, but there's the competency on screen is another because it is a almost perfect film. But Mike, I'm so very curious. What is that ADR line that bugs you so much?

It's a phony that at the end when it's, uh, there's a really rough cut of green street You know, with that knife and trying to scrape off the enamel and that ADR of him saying it's a phony. It's like that is not his voice. Somebody else was doing a Sydney Green Street impersonation at that point. Yeah, I I was so shocked to learn that the Maltese Falcon was in fact a fake in the film. I'm just I'm obviously kidding.

I did. I would say for me, that was one of my favorite scenes in the film is the kind of the payoff of, well, this the Maltese Falcon was never actually like, you know, what they've been striving for is actually hollow, which I think for me really speaks to the film noir of it all. Right. Like they've all gone out of their way for all of this. this one thing. And then in the end, it's like, well, they just have a whole, it's just a pile of sand.

It's a whole lot of nothing. It reminds me of, I'm trying to remember was, did you and I do it together? Mike, the killing, the Stanley Kubrick film. Did we do that one together? I don't think we did, but yeah, I love the end of that with all the money just blowing away.

It's the same thing, right? Sterling Hayden being like, what's the use, you know? But, but that for me, that's much more of a film noir because it's Sterling Hayden. Who's right there, you know, like through the entire thing, setting all this stuff up, seeing, oh, all of these plans just fall apart. You know, it's that desperate man doing desperate things.

And then at the end, just everything turning to just, you know, sand in his hands. And I, and you know, like you mentioned, I think that that really does speak to film noir. And I think, you know, that the killing obviously much more than the Maltese fall. Cause I think that's, that's the thing I was surprised by, by the end of the film is Sam Spade is, Is not in a worse. I mean, he's in a somewhat worse position by the end of the movie just because his partner is no longer with him.

But he is like moralistically righteous right now as a character. He's like he's done the right thing on every account. Like, would he have kept the Falcon if it was fake? Yeah. Or real, I mean, or if it had been real, not fake, who, who knows that you can't speak to that, but you can only speak to what the film presents you.

And it's just like, that's the one thing about the film that I was not expecting was the ending to be just so atypical of what my expectations were for a film noir film. That is again, such a like trend setter or trope creator of the genre as a whole. Are you now excited to see more Bogart, Laurie Greenstreet films? I am. I mean, again, like Humphrey Bogart is just one of those actors that I just had never really engaged with in a meaningful way.

And then, you know, Peter Lorre really just, again, was comedic voices in Animaniacs cartoons in the nineties, which again, doesn't really speak to either of their abilities as actors, but it does speak to, like we've already talked about the cultural impact of them as pop culture icons, I guess, or kind of, again, it's, I don't, you know, when we do these episodes of required viewing, it's always kind of so interesting to take a step back and look at everything as a, you know, one big picture holistically. And this is one of those films where every single thing that you come at it from is a really good example of that thing or the best example of that thing. Like all of the writing with this film is so good.

And John Houston is so kind of, intentional with what he's doing. Humphrey Bogart is so good. Like I, I know that there may not be as good of a film with these actors in it again that I watch, but at least this one exists. And it is, I mean, such a high watermark for all of them clearly. And for, again, for me as someone who had really not seen a film noir film before from this time or this specific, you know, kind of one, like this is, I don't know, like I understand, sometimes I watch a movie that's in the film registry and I'm like, why is this in the film registry?

And this one, I'm like, no, I get it. And I understand why it's in the first 25 films in the film registry. That makes perfect sense. Well, yeah, I would definitely recommend checking out Casablanca because you do get the three of them together. I won't necessarily recommend the other Green Street Laurie films, but there are some definitely great Laurie films.

I mentioned The Lost One. It's also known as The Lost Man from 1950. It was the only film that he directed there. I don't know if you've seen M, the Fritz Lang film yet, but fantastic. Actually, Chris, we watched Crime and Punishment together.

That's true. Okay, so that's like the other thing. Yeah, I guess we did cover that for our Columbo show many, many moons ago. That was what we did in the lead up to talking about Columbo, right? Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I would- Probably stay away from all of his Mr. Moto films. Seeing him play a Japanese man is probably not without cringe these days. But yeah, he was in a lot of great things.

Arsenic and Old Lace is probably one of my favorites. And that's where he really gets to show the comedic side. And then The Chase from 46. Absolutely wonderful. And when it comes to Bogart... there's so many things to choose from, but I would say the big sleep where you get to see, you know, another great detective story.

And you're just like, why didn't he do this his entire life? But then you look at things like you mentioned treasure Sierra Madre, which you've already seen the African queen, which is another Houston film with him in it. And then things like, um, Oh, I'm blanking on the name. Oh, the Kane Mutiny. He's wonderful in the Kane Mutiny.

But yeah, he was in a lot of great things, too. And also, with the African Queen and the Kane Mutiny, you're seeing the range that was possible. And we talked about how early in his career you wouldn't have been predicting he's going to be the tough detective and he would become an icon of that. Well, He could have kept playing those roles, right? And we've known a lot of actors who feel comfortable or Hollywood only feels comfortable with them being in a certain role over and over again.

But African Queen, he plays, you know, a scoundrel, somebody with the morals of, you know, I actually think snakes are very moralistic creatures. So, I mean, just this, he... just gives up on everything that a movie audience in the 40s would have said. Especially the later, the denouement in Casablanca. And then just he was willing to play these roles. Talk about like an actor where you see, you think like this person's lived a life.

He was willing to play roles where The makeup was gone. You know, like he was he was broken in some way, old and tired. And but he was willing to act. And I think that's a really to me was always interesting is when somebody becomes a leading man or a leading woman, do they care? to be an actor? Right.

And obviously there are many actors. leading men, leading women, leading actors who continue to put energy into their craft. There are other ones where honestly, I think once they've, they've just checked off that role that they love to play, they show up, get their check. And go home. And that's the way it looks on the screen. But his whole career, which was cut short early, we have to say he, he died young.

I mean, relatively died younger than I am. He, he, he tried, like he cared about his craft. And for an actor or a movie maker or professor or plumber or whatever, saying that someone cared about their craft, I think is probably one of the few universal compliments you can give to anybody. I think it speaks volumes to Bogart as an actor that you know, I mentioned the National Film Registry. In 1989, they inducted 25 films, and that was the year it was, you know, kind of created out of nothing.

And I think that was really important, obviously, then, you know, 1989, they had already, things had already been lost by then, but at least, you know, 1989 is not 1999 or 2009. So, 25 films get inducted. Maltese Falcon and Casablanca Casablanca is the only film from 1942 that's inducted, and Maltese Falcon is one of two films from 1941 that's inducted. The other one's Citizen Kane. I think it speaks volumes to Bogart as an actor, that he's in two films that are forever enshrined and will be taken care of forever, because that, I think, speaks to, again...

How important it is just for film in general, not just, you know, the film noir genre or Humphrey Bogart's career, but the whole of the conversation about American filmmaking does go through Citizen Kane and the Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. And those are films that, you know, two of those three films are Humphrey Bogart films. And that's so important. You know, it's funny, I'm looking at this list here, and in the last couple months, I have talked about more of these films than I would have ever thought I would, because not only have I talked about Maltese Falcon with you guys now, I think it was Richard and the professor and I talked about the best years of our lives earlier this year. And then Mike, you and I, and Richard talked about star Wars earlier this year, which was the old, or I guess the newest film that was inducted in 89.

Cause that was what 77. So it was like 12 years. They were like, this film's important. It's like, wow. Yeah.

To be inducted with all those other films is pretty important, but Humphrey Bogart, I think just like you guys have mentioned his range and, Clearly, just by what you guys have talked about, sounds impressive, but just his ability to kind of personify what when someone might think of a film noir detective, there's a 50% chance or better that it's going to be Humphrey Bogart, I think speaks volumes to just the cultural significance of him playing this role in this film for a lot of generations, myself included, of people who, when they think of a detective in a film... They think of Humphrey Bogart, even if they've never seen a Humphrey Bogart movie. That's who they're thinking of. And even the cadence of the way he talks is what you think of when you think of a film noir detective.

It comes from Humphrey Bogart. That speaks volumes to him as an actor, to this film as just kind of a– a seminal piece of kind of filmmaking, but also the long legs and kind of long tail, as it were, that this film has had on, I think, the film industry as a whole. There were a lot of films, because I covered this on The Projection with a few years ago, and there were a lot of films I watched because of this film. So the two previous versions of this, but then also in the 1970s, it felt like there was this odd resurgence of bogart and bogart related things like there was a there was a guy who looked a lot like bogart i'm trying to remember if he was an italian actor but he he. Was an italian actor and he was in an episode of tales from the crypt where they superimposed bogart's face.

On his right and he was in a movie called the man who had with the man with bogart's face man with bogart's face yeah there was also played against Sam, the play that, uh, with Woody Allen that became a movie. And then there was also a sequel quote unquote to, uh, the Maltese Falcon, like, cause there have been sequels and prequels written, uh, for the book and everything, but this was a sequel to the movie and it was called the black bird. And I think it was George Siegel, uh, running around, um, trying to escape characters that were very modeled on the characters from this movie. Not very good. Imagine that like a wacky seventies comedy detective story.

We've seen a few of those that aren't that good. But yeah, it was, it's interesting how that came up and, you know, you're talking about the impact on the culture and everything. There's a reason why there's that, you know, mock of Nighthawks at the diner or Nighthawks where it's like, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, maybe John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart all hanging out together. It's like, these are like movies, Mount Everest of, you know, very iconic, sorry to steal your term professor, but very iconic faces and presence in movies that these are the ones that are hanging out in this afterlife diner. Well, I was going to say even one step further, isn't Elvis in that sometimes as well?

He could be. It's been a minute since I've been to Hot Topic and looked at the posters, but that's where it would have been back in the early 90s. Robert Saki, by the way. or Saatchi is probably how you pronounce it, but that's the actor you're talking about from the man with Bogart's face. And also from that episode of tales from the crypt where they just CGI superimposed his face on the actor, which I believe that episode may have been directed by Robert Zemeckis, which Robert Zemeckis, I mean, would go on to, you know, I think that's, I think it was like a pre forest gump thing that they were doing there. Uh, it's, And, you know, to go back to that, this was the Zales commercial that I was talking about.

Like his his face and visage is so iconic that you could put it in a commercial for something as kind of trivial as diamonds. And people be like, oh, Humphrey Bogart's back from the dead selling diamonds. Who was a Gene Kelly dancing with a vacuum? Or there was that Audrey Hepburn spot a few years ago where she was. Gosh, I can't even remember what she was trying to sell.

That's how effective the commercial was. But it's like, yeah, there are very few actors that have been resurrected in that same way. That Bogart was one of the first ones. That's really saying something. And I think, you know, for me, this film sits in a weird spot because...

I've talked about a lot of movies this year that I was not expecting to ever cover primarily because it's not that I don't feel like I have anything to say about it, but it's one of those things where it's uphill already. When we did Star Wars a couple weeks ago, it's like, what can we add to the conversation about this little film from 1977 called Star Wars? I kind of felt the same way going into this episode. It's like, well, what can I say about a film that's been out since 1941? It's been addressed and readdressed and relitigated over and over and over again.

And like you said, John Houston telling so many apocryphal stories about everything and, you know, the Humphrey Bogart of it all and the Peter Lorre of it all. But I think for me as someone who had not seen it before, but had seen all the other things that it's been influenced by in terms of like random pop culture stuff, I had seen that instead. It's, it's nice to know that when you watch something like this, it does hold up to all of the things one expects from, um, a film like this, it lived up to the expectation of, I wanted to watch a film to understand why this film and what this film creates and evokes is so important for so many other things for the next 50, 60, 70, 80, because we're recording this one day before the film's 85th anniversary.

That was October 3rd, 1941. And it's still pertinent today in terms of the filmmaking and the filmmaking qualities and the qualities of the actors. And plenty of films came out in 1941 that that wasn't the case. That's the other thing. Thousands of films come out every year that nobody watches or talks about.

And I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing. It's just that's the way the industry is. So for a film to be this important for this long, for me to feel like it's an uphill, vertical, Eiger cliff face of a film to talk about because it is such an important film. But yet my takeaway from this entire episode sitting here and talking about it with both of y'all is. It is obvious when you watch the film why this film is so important and why this film stands the test of time. and was put into the film registry in 1989, the moment they created it, because I think it does, there's so much to be gleaned from the filmmaking and the filmmakers and the actors and just everything.

And it's just, I, I dare to say a perfect movie, but other than the one ADR line, which now that you mentioned it, Mike, I can totally hear it in my head, him saying that just in kind of like a really weird way. It is a perfect movie. It really is. Well, the quote from Seven Samurai, every perfect fortress should have one flaw so that we know what Mike White would critique. I think that's the exact line from the movie Seven Samurai.

There's that thing, I've talked about this before, about you know, there are these people that will make these beautiful, beautiful rugs and they always make sure to leave one flaw in the rug because they say, you know, the only thing that can be perfect is God. So this is our tribute. Like we can never be perfect. That for me is that little error in the rug. So it's okay to have a mistake just to prove that you're not as good as God.

So sorry, John Houston, you may have voiced God. You may have voiced Gandalf, but you, don't, yeah, you had to have that one little thing in there just to prove that you're not perfect. Sorry, John, that's Chinatown. Yeah. But, and I'll add, cause you've already referred to it.

John Houston was also a character that you don't see that much anymore. He was full out rock on tour, like, like any, you know, anytime he'd appear for an interview or give an interview, uh, you never knew what he was going to say or the wild ride you were going to go on. He would be perfectly happy giving a completely different version of a story that he told a year before because he just felt it was more entertaining to add some detail. So I have to think somewhere out there, there's an interview. He said, yeah, I purposely had my secretary do the voice of Sidney Greenstreet because I just wanted to screw around a little bit with the audience.

And See if they noticed. I mean, who knows, right? And he would say it in that incredible voice that was just like melted butter over hot lobster. He just, oh, I love that voice, man. And I loved, yeah, listening to him talk and tell stories and just.

His laugh was incredible. He was just such a joy to listen to, to hear him talk. I hear he was a real SOB in real life a lot of times, but for me, man, yeah, to hear his persona of John Huston is as important as John Huston, the filmmaker, John Huston, the actor, is John Huston, the persona. I've never seen White Hunter Blackheart, which I think where Clint Eastwood is basically channeling John Houston, trying to be John Houston. One of these days, maybe I'll finally get down to it.

There's like a handful of Eastwood films I haven't seen, but yeah, just Houston. Like, I don't know if there's a great documentary about him or not, but there should be. And just to hear more of him, just like, I don't even want to hear any other voices. Like, I'm sorry, Angelica. I'm sorry, everybody else, but just have John Houston married his own story because that voice, man.

Oh, it is so wonderful. I mean, I can hear him saying Mr. Gitz in my head right now. Yeah. It's so nice that Walter Houston shows up here for a hot second as the boat captain who dies and, you know, hands over the actual dingus.

That's such a nice little nod. And yeah, Houston, John Houston is, you know, a legacy with Walter and then Angelica, you know, just really Walter, Walter, Him directing his father, John directing Walter in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I mean, that is I think Houston, Walter Houston won an Oscar for that, which is a pretty good testament to just what a great role that is. Yeah, he was a Nepo baby. It's interesting to think about that.

Like, you know, today people look, it's part of the cultural discussion. There are some, I know I read years ago a book about him, Courage in Art. I wasn't reading the author, but like there's some good biographies. And he was just, this is again, this question about whether you're casting an actor who to play a role or you're casting an actor because the actor himself, herself adds to the role. Right.

Not like we want someone to play a little orphan nanny. No, we want somebody who's going to play a little orphan nanny and add dimensionality because of the force of their personality, the force of their voice and whatever. And I think that that's something that, again, I'm talking to students who will work in media. Now, some of them do go on to work in Hollywood. Some of them go on to work for the public relations department at major corporations and so on.

But. All of them have a yearning to create, to, to, to make something that wasn't, didn't, didn't exist before. And it could be again, an advertising video and it could be a two hour movie. And I feel like my job is to sort of raise issues and make suggestions, not to tell them, like, this is the only way, because to some extent, them inventing their own way is part of the process. But in terms of required viewing, and I guess this is my final statement for the Maltese Falcon for now, unless we want to do a part two, which we could, but is that You watch a film like this, not because we're saying, hey, this is the greatest film in the genre ever made.

You want to be good kid, go out and copy that. But take a look at the choices they make. And think about the choices you want to make and what can you learn from their process and their outcome of making choices. We're not saying you have to make the same choices, but look at the impact of this film, the Academy Awards, and then the wave function. I always tell my students that when you're hit by a tsunami wave, that's not the same molecules of water that as we're right next to the volcano when it went off, right?

It's a wave function, it's energy that's hitting you. And that's really what we're saying is this film was made so many years ago, so many decades ago, older than us, believe it or not older than me, but the wave function is still hitting us. And man, that's aspirational for great art. Yeah. And, you know, like, like we've all already kind of alluded to, you know, it's, It's rare to be as talented as a John Huston, who as an actor had an impact, as a director had an impact, as a screenwriter he had an impact.

But for him to have made the impact that he made with this film, along with everybody else, like you said, Professor, it speaks volumes to the ability of good, great, amazing, transcendent art. It speaks to, like we've all said, what really great art can do and what it can offer and what it can inspire. And there are a lot of things that aren't able to do that, but art is one of those things that consistently I feel like is able to resonate in a way that most things don't. And that's, that's why, I mean, that's why we do what we do. That's why we talk about film because film is such an engaging art form that, uh, you know, it, it lives forever as long as you take care of it.

Otherwise it could, it could turn into a, what happens with, uh, with, with nitrate film, it becomes like a bomb essentially. At least that's what the film Zodiac led me to believe. Don't store nitrate film canisters in your basement in Southern California that does it or Northern California that doesn't have any basements. Uh, cause those could explode. So it's, uh, yeah, films don't preserve themselves, but man, this, uh, this film's legacy, I think it's, it's important and you can watch it right now on HBO max, uh, which is, which is wild to me that it's just sitting on HBO max to watch as well, because I don't think anyone, when this film was being made with thought, Oh, it'll be streaming streaming.

What does that even mean? We can't even fathom that. So, um, Um, so until the next time you hear Dr. Perlmutter and I talking about required viewing films, and as always, you can find myself and Mike and, uh, the professor over at weirdingwaymedia.com where this show, the required viewing, uh, the culture cast, Mike show, the projection booth, midnight viewing for mentories, our latest, uh, addition to the network movie meltdown. All of those film podcasts can be found along with some TV show podcasts like 80s TV ladies, uh, The Feminine Critique.

Mike and I do a Columbo show. We do all kinds of things, and all those things can be found at weirdingwaymedia.com, patreon.com slash culturecast, or patreon.com slash projectionbooth is where you can go to kick a couple dollars our way to financially support our shows. But if you don't want to, just like, rate, and review it wherever you get it on iTunes or Spotify. Those are the two places that kind of matter. Everywhere else is less important.

So if you want to help us out, go on over to iTunes or Spotify. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate this.

I feel honored to be invited along on this one. So thank you so much. And as always, we'll catch you on the next episode. Thank you.