Word: falcon
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...Maltese Falcon. At the Brattle Theater, nightly at 7:40. With The Big Sleep...
...Maltese Falcon. Don't call it a thesis, but it seems that some of the most talented directors of American films have done their finest work the first time out. I'm thinking especially of Orson Welles and Citizen Kane and John Huston, who produced this hard-boiled masterpiece on his first feature assignment for Warner Brothers. Like Welles, Huston grew up around the greasepaint. And like Welles, Huston came to films with a gleeful yet prodigiously discriminating eye for characature and atmosphere-creating jargon. He handles Humphrey Bogart perfectly in the role of Sam Spade--by letting Bogart...
...group of uncoordinated, spastic white people in the corner of the stage, Jim Brown moans: "They can't do nothin', there. They can't boogie, they can't play hoops, shake their bootie..they can't do nothing." Even the silly "Maltese Toilet", a satire on the falcon of that lineage, was retrieved by a wonderful impersonation of Bogart by a pelvis swingin' Woody Allenesque male lead...
...image of Hollywood as generous provider is even less credible in the later sections of Some Time in the Sun. The talents of William Faulkner, which resulted in films like "The Maltese Falcon," "To Have and Have Not" and "The Big Sleep," go largely unappreciated by either the movie people or Dardis. Aldous Huxley, more successful in Dardis's terms because he made more money than Faulkner, spent his last years in Hollywood meditating on his own limitations. Nathanael West, forgotten in the basement of a second-rate studio where he slaved night and day to write cheap gangster flicks...
...lives well off the fruits of all this labor. He owns a house in St.-Moritz, rents others in St.-Tropez and Anif, near Salzburg. After his back surgery, he can again pilot a jet (a new Dassault Falcon 10). "The joy of flying has nothing to do with speed," he remarks. "You prepare and do well at the moment. There is enormous satisfaction in organization. That is why I don't play cards. I am afraid when you cannot foresee the outcome...