Today I will be analyzing all three versions of The Maltese Falcon film’s the scene I’ve chosen to review the scene where Spade is visited and questioned by police detectives Lt. Dundy and Sergeant Tom Polhaus. Although the films are based on the same novel The Maltese Falcon (1930), they differ in many ways I’ll use the scene I mentioned above to show the differences in mood, setting, the behavior and attitude of the main characters in this scene. The second thing I’ll do is show how breaking down a particular scene before you’ve watched the entire film could lead a first time viewer of the films could create a different conclusion in their minds than the one the films already has.
If you have viewed all three films the first thing you may notice is that the place where the detectives visit Spade for questioning varies between the three films. We see that two of the films (1931, 1941) take them to Spades apartment and the other (1936) they meet him a night club or speakeasy as it was called in those days. Even
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A great example of this would be in Satan Met a Lady when asked by spade “This is a nice place for a third degree aye Roy?” His response and actions while replying “I’ll say so” are kind of like a kid in a candy store and could give viewers the notion that he wasn’t interested in the investigation, in fact the novel hints at his lack of intelligence Hammett states when asked a question “Tom groans, but said nothing articulate” (20). In the 1941 film he seemed like less of an imbecile, but still a bit slower than the 1936’s Detective Polhaus. I speculate that viewers with no prior knowledge of this film or novel could see his behavior as suspicious and form a hypothesis that he is an accomplice in the murder of Archer rather than an incompetent