John Huston

[HinkyDinkyTruesmith]

I agree with criticisms of the movie, more or less, until the last five minutes, which belongs to what seems like a totally different, far greater, movie. Bogart and Astor seem ill-fitting until the desperation at the end really sinks in. You kind of can see in real time Bogart the supporting actor from gangster pictures of the 30s become Bogart the legendary leading man of the 40s in the very last few minutes.

[JSC]

I always thought Mary Astor to be perfect in the part and never really thought of her as a femme fatale
(at least as it came to be defined in later film noir). She is simply as duplicitous as everyone else in the story.
The tightly wound features coupled with a vaguely finishing school accent make Astor's portrayal quite unusual.
In Hammett's novel, I didn't find the character particularly well drawn.

[FrauBlucher]

It doesn't surprise me to read on the film's Wikipedia page that something like 50% of the leading women working in Hollywood passed on the role before Astor took it.

Wow 50% sounds like a lot. I do remember hearing some big names turn it down though. I’d be curious as to know the reasons. I wonder if it had to do with Huston never directing a picture before this. For me Astor was kind of stiff and unsexy. Very business like but maybe that’s the point of her character. I’d still would’ve love to see someone else.

Btw… I don’t hate the Maltese Falcon. If it’s on TCM I don’t turn it off. I just don’t feel the reverence others do. As for Huston his best was yet to come, by a long shot

[senseabove]

I actually love Astor in this. Do I buy her as sexy seductress? No, but the noir momentum isn't behind anything like a fatal decision by Bogie here; it's behind who knows who's playing wise, who is, who knows who's playing dumb, and who is, so she's playing seductress/helpless and Bogie is playing seduced/daddy and everyone, audience included, is trying to figure out who's got the right rhythm to jump the rugpull. I think she handles standing on that narrative quicksand marvelously.

[The Curious Sofa]

Absolutely not. She's one of the worst high-profile casting decisions I can think of in a studio Hollywood movie (and some of the others, like Frank Sinatra in Guys and Dolls, have their own weird positive quirks). It doesn't surprise me to read on the film's Wikipedia page that something like 50% of the leading women working in Hollywood passed on the role before Astor took it.

Actually, it says that many leading actresses were considered for the role, but Geraldine Fitzgerald was the only one to be offered it and turn it down, before Astor got the part. Astor had been involved in a high-profile sex scandal a few years previously, and it has often been speculated that this notoriety helped her get the role. I always thought that her aristocratic and somewhat uptight demeanour makes her duplicitousness more surprising and find her an interesting contrast to the more overtly seductive femme fatales to come.

[therewillbeblus]

I actually love Astor in this. Do I buy her as sexy seductress? No, but the noir momentum isn't behind anything like a fatal decision by Bogie here; it's behind who knows who's playing wise, who is, who knows who's playing dumb, and who is, so she's playing seductress/helpless and Bogie is playing seduced/daddy and everyone, audience included, is trying to figure out who's got the right rhythm to jump the rugpull. I think she handles standing on that narrative quicksand marvelously.

Very well said, total agreement. I don't need to 'buy' Astor in a certain fashion because everyone is clearly crooked and it's just about watching them grapple to see who winds up on top. That might not be an amusing set-up for some viewers, but it doesn't make her bad for the role

[domino harvey]

But, like, Astor is supposed to be so hot in this that it immediately causes the death of Bogart’s partner and many others to meet their doom. If this was a sex symbol of the time like Ann Sheridan (not that WB would have been willing to tarnish her sexpot image, granted, just trying to propose a better alternative) or even the opposite direction with a coquettish “innocent” like Anne Shirley, I’d buy it. But not from some blue blood stuffed shirt (skirt?)

Geraldine Fitzgerald would have been an awful choice too btw!

[Sloper]

I'm definitely in the pro-Astor camp, and can't imagine anyone else playing this role as well as she does. She's performing high-status but constantly revealing her fear and vulnerability, and I love how the film never asks us to withdraw our sympathy from her - indeed I think she's one of the most sympathetic femmes fatales from this era, especially when you watch the film knowing how things will turn out.

She and Bogart make a lot more sense to me, as a couple, than Bogart and Bacall: Sam and Brigid are different and complementary in the right ways (for this kind of film) to make me buy into their relationship, but also to make it clear why Sam attaches an asterisk to their 'love' for each other in the final scene. And I agree that this final scene is the best bit. Sam didn't even like Miles, but he's supposed to avenge him, and the pragmatism that makes him follow this vague imperative also makes him realistic about the quasi-relationship between him and Brigid (and its chances for success if he tries to help her).

I guess I understand why people might find the film a bit stagy, but I like stagy films when they are as beautifully shot as this one. I never really care about the plot of The Maltese Falcon, I just love watching the characters interact. As in the long dialogue scenes in Miller's Crossing (these films are closely related in my mind), I find all the camera placements, movements, and edits well chosen, and all the performance choices note-perfect. The way Bogart's face is lit compared to Astor's, the blocking (when they move across the room or stand against a wall, when the camera moves to follow them, when one of them turns to face the camera), it all just seems expertly calibrated.

This is why the Bogart/Astor relationship works for me, and why I understand both Brigid's desperation and Sam's reluctant betrayal of her in the final scene. There are echoes of this in Tom Reagan's obscurely-motivated actions, which we understand are tied up with his futile sense of duty towards Leo, and later (I would argue) towards Caspar as well. The endings of both films depend on an accumulation of shot/reverse-shot interactions that convey just the right emotions, and The Maltese Falcon is a masterclass in how this can be done well, on a small number of sets, using camerawork that does everything it needs to do without drawing attention to itself.

[Michael Kerpan]

I'm with sloper on this one.

[Beloved Aunt]

To me The Maltese Falcon has the kind of "style" one gets from a young director who is, with all due respect (a great deal), a hack with visuals. Whatever semi-pleasing pictorial style the film possesses is just the glaze of youth, and I guess it would evolve later on in Huston's career into something a bit better (forgetting whatever else his various cinematographers would contribute), most filmmakers get better in this arena with practice, pretty much.

I don't count The Asphalt Jungle as being quite as good a film as my favorite Hustons--The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, (haven't seen The African Queen), the film that Fat City sometimes is, The Man Who Would Be King, and perhaps The Dead. Aesthetically The Asphalt Jungle is kind of like David Fincher's Zodiac--these films are trying to do something quite fascinating but with, on a more incidental, surface level, insufficient means, as one sometimes gets from an egghead/brilliant nerd piece of material the film's surface is not up to the ideas. (I feel the same way about Kubrick's The Shining). In Asphalt Jungle, the characters are such bland little ciphers, with their bland pathos, at least Sterling Hayden and Jean Hagen are. Even the "colorful supporting character", Sam Jaffe, is blandly colorful. I want a more thoroughly convincing-in-feel criminal milieu.

[Mr Sausage]

Side note, but Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle is how I pictured hulking Moose Molloy from Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. I guess 1944 was too early for the adaptation, Murder, My Sweet, to get him, but he'd probably've been better than whatever bruiser they eventually hired.

[Sloper]

In Asphalt Jungle, the characters are such bland little ciphers, with their bland pathos, at least Sterling Hayden and Jean Hagen are. Even the "colorful supporting character", Sam Jaffe, is blandly colorful. I want a more thoroughly convincing-in-feel criminal milieu.

The Asphalt Jungle is one of my favourite films, so of course I disagree, but I have to admit I was underwhelmed by it on my first viewing. I was hoping for something like The Killing, in which the plot, characters, and style seemed much more vivid. But my opinion flipped as I re-visited these two films.

The pathos with which the characters are invested in Huston’s film – especially Dix and Doll – does not seem ‘bland’ to me, but deeply empathetic. It’s a beautiful example of an ‘everyone has their reasons’ film, in which even the minor characters seem authentic and seem like they are the main character in their own story.

The one possible exception is Angela, who unfortunately is betrayed by the script in her final scene (‘Do I still get to go on my trip, Uncle Lon?’), but even here Marilyn Monroe is able to invest the character with genuine pathos.

What makes The Asphalt Jungle so tragic is how little the characters understand each other, as exemplified in Dix’s reaction to Doll’s devotion (‘I don’t get it… I just don’t get it…’) and Riedenschneider’s derisive final judgement about Emmerich. In both cases, the film has given enough time and space to Doll and Emmerich that we have more empathy for them, and of course to Dix and Riedenschneider so we understand why they don’t understand…and even to the Police Commissioner, so we understand why he writes Dix off as a monster in that wonderful moment when we transition to the final scene, which is one of the all-time great endings in my book.

As I said about The Maltese Falcon, much of this is down to small details of performance, blocking, camera movement, and editing. I’ll just single out one moment: the argument between Gus and Maria (Louis’s wife) when she calls him a ‘cripple’ and a ‘crooked back’ and he says, ‘What I carry on my back I was born with, I didn’t grow it there myself.’ James Whitmore plays the emotion just right – more hurt than angry, and then we see shame and humiliation wash over him as the anger subsides. Teresa Celli is so sincerely apologetic, and it’s so clear that both characters know where her remark came from – her anguish over her husband, who is bleeding to death in the next room, and her need to blame somebody (as she says). Then they hear a siren outside. Gus, looking out of the window, says there must be a fire somewhere; Maria, at the kitchen table behind him, says she hopes the doctor will arrive soon; Gus reassures her; and after a pause, in which the siren intensifies, Maria says, ‘Sounds like a soul in hell.’ The scene encapsulates the loneliness of the whole film, the sense of people struggling with their own impossible circumstances, displacing their pain and anger onto each other, and feeling a nascent empathy but not knowing what to do with it. And all this is buried away in an ostensibly hard-nosed film noir – it’s amazing.

Side note, but Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle is how I pictured hulking Moose Molloy from Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. I guess 1944 was too early for the adaptation, Murder, My Sweet, to get him, but he'd probably've been better than whatever bruiser they eventually hired.

I really like Mike Mazurki’s turn as Moose in that film, especially the way he mutters, ‘You shouldn’t-a hit me, you shouldn’t-a hit me…’ But yes, perhaps Hayden would have been better.

[ballmouse]

Hayden I think would've been too handsome for Moose. Mazurki seemed like pretty decent casting to me. Reading the novel, I felt like Richard Kiel would've been ideal but he was born too late.

[Beloved Aunt]

I agree Mazurki is good casting (and so is Jack O'Halloran in the 1975 film! I love, well, really like, Farewell, My Lovely. Jonathan Rosenbaum's review sums up very well what's so good about it: https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2025/09/f ... 75-review/) Sterling Hayden is hulking and tall and brawny but not intimidating or freakish or weird or anything, he's too much of a leading man for this role.

My "best friend" (LOL) once told me that the opening credits to The Maltese Falcon were drawn in ten minutes, the night before the film opened. He was, um, a wee bit of a liar, but the film is kind of a tatty production in some ways, even though I love it nonetheless, that maybe....?

[Beloved Aunt]

... the source material.

AAAaaaaah! Domino ended a sentence with a period! Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!

[Mr Sausage]

Sterling Hayden is hulking and tall and brawny but not intimidating or freakish or weird or anything, he's too much of a leading man for this role.

His intro in Asphalt Jungle, where he gets all weird and sore about petty slights, and seems constantly on the edge of an irrational violence the others have to talk him down from, was Moose to the core. And while he was handsome, he could hang his jaw in this slack way that negated it, made him look mean and brutish. He could have brought a few shades to the character who is at base a lovesick puppy in a doberman’s body.

But this isn’t to criticize Mazurski or Murder, My Sweet. It’s just Hayden from Asphalt is who I had in my mind’s eye when reading the novel for the first time last year (hadn’t seen the movie versions by that point).

[Finch]

Brigid presents as the damsel in distress at the start of the film which allows Spade's colleague to pretend he's the knight in shining armor protecting O'Shaughnessy. She'd have flattered him in that vein to make him drop his guard when they were alone so I don't think Astor needed to be sexually attractive in the way Ann Sheridan would have been. I wasn't keen on Mary Astor the first two viewings and now I find it hard to picture anyone else in the role.

[FrauBlucher]

But was that Huston’s intent? I mean it worked out but say if Ann Sheridan or someone like her was offered the role and accepted it contrary to all the rumors of actresses declining then how much would Maltese Falcon be the same. I would argue other actresses could’ve pulled it off just as well. We’ll never know of course. And perhaps Huston got lucky.

Edit: According to ChatGPT Ann Sheridan was not one considered. Actresses that were considered are Loretta Young, Joan Bennett, Pricilla Lane, Olivia de Havilland, Paulette Godard, Rita Hayworth, Andrea Leeds amongst some others.

I now will look forward to seeing this again with new eyes and thoughts on it. Thanks to this convo and Domino kicking it off

[The Curious Sofa]

But was that Huston’s intent? I mean it worked out but say if Ann Sheridan or someone like her was offered the role and excepted it contrary to all the rumors of actresses declining then how much would Maltese Falcon be the same. I would argue other actresses could’ve pulled it off just as well. We’ll never know of course. And perhaps Huston got lucky.

Edit: According to ChatGPT Ann Sheridan was not one considered. Actresses that were considered are Loretta Young, Joan Bennett, Pricilla Lane, Olivia de Havilland, Paulette Godard, Rita Hayworth, Andrea Leeds amongst some others.

I now will look forward to seeing this again with new eyes and thoughts on it. Thanks to this convo and Domino kicking it off

As I mentioned before, the only actress confirmed to have been offered the role before Mary Astor was Geraldine Fitzgerald, who the studio wanted to launch as a new star (while younger than Astor, I'm not sure I find her conventionally sexy). When Fitzgerald turned the part down, it went to Astor and she appears to have been more Huston's choice.

[crimlaw]

Now let’s imagine George Raft playing Sam Spade.

[domino harvey]

Raft is a bad actor but the role is def within his range. He would not have brought the puckish qualities Bogart delivers, obv, but I’m not sure it’d be as big a disaster as it sounds

[FrauBlucher]

But was that Huston’s intent? I mean it worked out but say if Ann Sheridan or someone like her was offered the role and accepted it contrary to all the rumors of actresses declining then how much would Maltese Falcon be the same. I would argue other actresses could’ve pulled it off just as well. We’ll never know of course. And perhaps Huston got lucky.

Edit: According to ChatGPT Ann Sheridan was not one considered. Actresses that were considered are Loretta Young, Joan Bennett, Pricilla Lane, Olivia de Havilland, Paulette Godard, Rita Hayworth, Andrea Leeds amongst some others.

I now will look forward to seeing this again with new eyes and thoughts on it. Thanks to this convo and Domino kicking it off

As I mentioned before, the only actress confirmed to have been offered the role before Mary Astor was Geraldine Fitzgerald, who the studio wanted to launch as a new star (while younger than Astor, I'm not sure I find her conventionally sexy). When Fitzgerald turned the part down, it went to Astor and she appears to have been more Huston's choice.

That doesn't mean all these other actresses weren't being considered and never offered, perhaps because the studio and/or Huston knew they weren't interested

[Never Cursed]

1. Maybe this is my reading between the lines where there is no evidence for it, but my assumption was that "considered for the role" meant a bit more than Huston and the producers bouncing ideas for the female leads off each other, especially given that Fitzgerald and de Havilland were under contract to Warners at this time.

2. Can we not cite ChatGPT as a source?

[Finch]

If deHavilland's turn in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte is any indication as to how she might have played O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, I'm glad she didn't get the part, if she ever was in contention. I like her a lot in Robin Hood and Captain Blood as well as The Heiress but she felt miscast in the Aldrich. Too wholesome for that, and by extension for the O'Shaughnessy part.

[JSC]

My understanding is that de Havilland was a last minute replacement on Charlotte after Joan Crawford
left the project (or was maneuvered off it, depending on who you ask). It was also Mary Astor's last film.

On the subject of Astor, as a contrast to her other roles I think she's definitely worth seeing in a small but
pivotal role in Act of Violence. She also wrote a pretty candid autobiography that's worth a read (she
became a novelist later on).