Satan Met a Lady

I can practically recite "The Maltese Falcon" by heart, so I was intrigued by this alternate filming. I put the tape in and immediately went "What the. . . ." Then I picked up the box and saw the word "comedy." so I sat down and watched it on its own terms. It's a hoot. the trick is to never really think about the great Bogart version and just think of it as a send-up of the genre. It is much better this way. I especially the ditsy blonde secretary, and the bumbling gunsel.

They had to have kidnapped Bette Davis and forced her to do this film at gun point. For the studio to waste the time of this major star was indeed a crime. This flick was painful, I'm talking major "kaka". It probably single-handedly caused a drop of Trumpet sales during that period when it was released.

The only saving grace was Marie Wilson who played the role of the secretary, Miss Murgatroyd. I'm sure she was the inspiration for all those actresses who perform or do that stereotypical nasal ingenue dumb Blonde shtick.

Having said all that the film is still an amusing watch if you take a couple of hits of "devil's lettuce".

Boy, once Warner Brothers bought a property, they did everything but serve it for dinner. 1936's "Satan Met a Lady" is yet another version of "The Maltese Falcon," which was finally given the classic touch by John Huston in 1941. This particular version is out of control but manages to be a lot of fun at the same time.

This time Sam Spade is named Shane, and he's played by '30s star Warren William. William was a tall, handsome man with sharp features and a refined speaking voice - by this time, he was the Warners version of William Powell, though he had started his career as an unsympathetic, precode villain. A more extroverted performer, he excelled at the William Powell-type vehicles. He even took over for Powell as Philo Vance. William was the movie Perry Mason, and if you think this is a wild "Maltese Falcon," you should see what was done to Perry before the TV series. Put it this way - Della Street wore diamonds.

In this version, the falcon is the Horn of Roland, a trumpet stuffed with jewels, and it's being sought by a young, pretty Bette Davis in the Bebe Daniels-Astor role, and now the Sydney Greenstreet character has had a sex change in the form of Madame Barrabas (Alison Skipworth). Though there's no doubt Barrabas a ruthless character. and the usual people have been murdered by the usual people, this version is pretty much played for laughs. It moves faster than the Cortez version, and while Cortez played Spade as a delightful rogue, William has a ball, laughing at the whole thing as he collects money from everyone. In the Cortez version, Spade had some feeling for Ms. Wonderly (Bebe Daniels); here, William clearly enjoys playing the field and never takes the Davis character seriously. Shane's secretary in "Satan Met a Lady" is played by Marie Wilson, whose part is quite large. She's very funny. Davis is okay, but her sincerity isn't believable - at this point in her career, she's still a little stagey.

The very tongue-in-cheek William runs this show, which is done in the style of "The Thin Man." Though it was a bomb when it was released, today it's of interest for Davis, its handling of the material, and also as a chance to see William, who died in 1948, in top form. After this film, he went into character roles.

Recommended.

The second version of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon came in the wake of the big success of a cinematic adaptation of another of the author's novels, The Thin Man. So here we get a comic version starring a wise-cracking gentleman, Warren William (who had played Julius Caesar in DeMille's Cleopatra). The comedy is sometimes desperate. It's played WAY over the top. If they had toned in down a tad, and maybe got William Powell instead of Warren William, it would have been a great film. Which would have been terrible because then, if it had been a success, Warner Brothers wouldn't have deigned to remake it five years later. We wouldn't have the 1941 masterpiece, John Huston's career might have went an entirely different way, and film noir wouldn't have developed as we know it. Film history might look damn different just because of this goofy little adaptation! It's generally considered the worst of the three adaptations, but I really liked it. It's a heck of a lot better than the stale '31 version, and it stands as a nice little companion piece to the '41 version. A couple of the actors I really liked, notably Alison Skipworth in the Gutman role (all character names have been changed, by the way, but I'll keep to the originals), Arthur Treacher as Cairo, and Maynard Holmes as Wilmer (shockingly uncredited where several less important characters were!). The best of the best, though: Marie Wilson in the Effie role. Oh. You thought I was going to say Bette Davis. Nah. She's probably the least of the three Brigids. The secretary role is expanded a bit, and she's almost made Spade's love interest. Wilson gives a very cute comic performance. Well worth checking out.

Dash Hammett wasn't a very good writer, but he was something of a genius in creating characters that sell. Films with his characters were only successful when heavily filtered through the inventive context of a filmmaker.

Hammett hated it, this messing with his tone. But the original "Falcon" was something of a disaster. Someone had the idea (possibly Van Dyke) of making the Thin Man as a comedy. It was a huge success and has in retrospect been one of the most influential films of the era. So it only made sense for us to see this similar reworking of "Falcon" shortly after the Thin Man's success.

But Van Dyke had a sense of timing and the ability to integrate that rhythm into the whole long form. This poor fellow has no such sense, so the humor is all over the place, each character driving their own bus.

So when you watch it, you have to decide which character to align your perspective with. Though I cannot recommend the picture, if you do see it, I do recommend you become the ditsy blond secretary (who cannot even spell her own name).

She's every bit capable of carrying this movie, where the detective cannot.

I don't suppose she invented the ditz, but it was this girl, here a nineteen year old Marie Wilson who combined a Betty Boop "whoop" to become the sexually available, innocent but hungry, absolutely sweet but terminally dumb blond. Its great fun watching her mouth, a great mouth, one of the era's great mouths managed by an unappreciated master.

The end of the movie is supposed to be something of a tragedy as the Bette Davis character is lost. But because our detective (something of a breezy dolt) has this ready girl to fall back on, the effect is lost.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.