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| Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr. |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
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Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet): I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, its possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon.
Sam Spade, a private detective, gets involved in a murderous hunt for a valuable statuette.
 As much as I would love to engage in some revisionist film historiography and take critical aim at a beloved film with a guaranteed place in our hallowed film canon, The Maltese Falcon leaves precious few opportunities for criticism open to even the most curmudgeonly film critic. Besides being an absolute model of narrative efficiency, without a moment of screen time wasted, it was also a film that pushed the limits of the Production Code with its sexual innuendo and all-but-forthright homosexual characters. And with Bogart in a star-making, career-defining turn as delicious today as it ever was and John Huston's first outing as writer-director, The Maltese Falcon will no doubt continue to resist any and every attempt one might undertake to rob it of its rightful place in the cinema pantheon. |
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First released as an early vanilla disc for most regions, The Maltese Falcon has now been restored and reissued as a Special Edition DVD. The American release is a three-disc package, with two earlier film adaptations and radio plays on the third platter. The European version, which served as the basis for this review, is a two-disc set.
The fullscreen
image is framed at its original Academy aspect ratio of approx. 1.33:1. The earlier movie-only DVD featured a perfectly serviceable transfer, but it pales in comparison to the rich, near-flawless restoration job on this new release. There is scarcely a hint of damage to the print, while blacks are deep, detail is rich, and greyscale is beautifully consistent.
The original mono sound mix has also been cleaned up, now exhibiting remarkable fidelity and excellent clarity.
 The first disc features as its main extra an audio commentary track from Bogart biographer Eric Lax, and although Lax is an pleasant and well-informed speaker, the track as a whole does represent something of a missed opportunity, as he focuses throughout on the film's star to the exclusion of nearly everything else. With a film that has so many stories worth telling, a little more variation in the speaker's perspective may have opened up many extra doors.
The other inclusion on the first disc is the familiar but still welcome 'Warner Night at the Movies' option, which offers viewers the option to recreate an approximation of the film-going experience from the year the film was made.
A trailer, a newsreel, a supporting short and two cartoons precede the film with this option selected.
The second disc holds the mos worthwhile inclusion as far as extras are concerned: a new half-hour documentary titled 'One Magnificent Bird', which provides a competent overview of the film's production history and reception. The other extras however are somewhat disappointing: the 45-minute 'Becoming Attractions' is a repeat of the collection of Bogart trailers previously encountered on earlier Warner releases, while 'Breakdowns of 1941' presents a series of inconsequential bloopers from an array of 1941 Warner Bros. productions. Finally, a one-minute make-up test for Mary Astor rounds out the extras on the European special edition release. The American version includes an extra DVD with the two earlier film adaptations of the same story, along with a radio play.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed:
January 10, 2007
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