Maltese Falcon Aspects That Never Made The Movie
1) The Flitcraft Parable — wherein Spade tells Brigid an episode about an average man, married, with a steady job, who one day narrowly escapes death from a falling steel construction beam. He then dissappears, only to be found in another city, with another name, another steady job, and another wife. ” He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
2) Gutman has a teen daughter who he keeps drugged and bound in a distant home, far from the city. Spade finds her, with needle holes in her stomach and arms, dazed and emaciated. Although she really has no solid impact on the search for the Falcon, I think Hammett used the tawdry inferences of her forced imprisonment / sexual servitude / being drugged by her own father / possible incest to paint Gutman as a truly evil man, to sway the reader away from liking him. After all , he is a most charming and cultured villian.
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It’s coincidental that John Huston himself played a character much like Gutman – mildly corrupt on the outside, inherently depraved on the inside — in ” Chinatown “. The two films could be discussed side by side in fact, especially Bogart vs Nicholson, or Nicholson as Bogart.
Humphrey Bogart Maltese Falcon Trailer