Word: spadefuls
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Amado reads his characters in depth. There is no facile division into good guys and bad guys, and everyone's motives are mixed. The lawyer, Virgilio, who helps Horacio outwit the Badarós, also seduces Horacio's pretty wife. And spade-bearded Sinhó Badaró, who has arranged the killing of many men, still agonizes over each decision-in fact, his soul searching destroys the efficiency of his best gunman, Negro Damião. As in U.S. westerns, the land is the real hero, breeding men as luxuriant, lavish and cruel as itself. Presumably spurred...
...Spade is the quintessence of the heartless pragmatist--the sardonic, self-interested loner who rolls his own cigarettes, and who just happens to operate within the limits of the law most of the time because he knows he's better off that way. He's so callous he hardly reacts when he hears his partner has been murdered. He doesn't bother to look at the body. Asked if the partner were married, he replies curtly, "Yeah, with 10,000 insurance, no children, and a wife who didn't like him." His only immediate concerns after the murder...
...film ends, Spade casually "sends over" his former client and paramour to the police for a murder (she's guilty), explaining coldly, "Your're taking the fall. One of us has got to take it - I won't play the sap for you." He dismisses the possibility that "Maybe you love me and maybe I love you," as inconsequential in the long run: "I'll have some rotten nights - but that'll pass...
...movie has been brilliantly cast. Bogart surely "born to play" Sam Spade. The detective's bitter lines get sharp emphasis from Bogart's smug grin and sour lisp, making Spade probably the most thoroughly intimidating character Bogie ever portrayed. Sydney Green-street is just right as the jovial, pedantic Fat Man, obsessed with the "black bird." His great line: "Well, by Gad, if you lose a son it's possible to get another, but there's only one Maltese Falcon," is perhaps the best in a movie full of great lines. Peter Lorre is suitably effete and prim...
...Howard Hawkes' version of "The Maltese Falcon." Based rather closely on the Raymond Chandler novel, which, in turn, seems to have borrowed heavily from Hammett's, "The Big Sleep" has several important elements in common with the earlier movie: Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is a just-barely-watered-down Sam Spade - a little more romantic, but otherwise every bit as hard and even more violent; he has to contend with a similarly secretive and much more attractive client (Lauren Bacall); and he, like Spade, has to keep the police at bay so they don't gum up his investigation...