The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon is a 1931 American pre-Code crime film based on the 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and directed by Roy Del Ruth. The film stars Ricardo Cortez as private detective Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as femme fatale Ruth Wonderly. The supporting cast features Dudley Digges, Thelma Todd, Walter Long, Una Merkel, and Dwight Frye. Maude Fulton and Brown Holmes wrote the screenplay; one contemporaneous report said that Lucien Hubbard was assisting them. While the film was successful, its legacy was deeply hampered by the enforcement of the Hays Code. The film was remade by the studio twice, with its 1941 remake starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor overshadowing its predecessors. The film was not seen in its entirety until after the collapse of the Code in the mid-1960s. A print has been held by the Library of Congress since the 1970s. Plot In San Francisco, private investigator Sam Spade (Ricardo Cortez) and his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long) are hired by Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels) to follow Floyd Thursby, a man that allegedly ran off with her younger sister. Later that night, police detective Tom Polhaus (J. Farrell MacDonald) informs Spade that Archer has been killed while tailing Thursby. Thursby is killed later, and the police suspect Spade. The next day, Spade calls on Wonderly in an attempt to find out her real reasons for hiring them. She gives Spade little information, but manages to keep him on the case. Later, Dr. Joel Cairo (Otto Matieson) visits his office and offers him $5,000 if he can retrieve an enamel figurine of a black bird. Cairo is trying to recover it for the "rightful owner". Not knowing anything about the statuette, Spade plays along and agrees to try to recover it.