The Maltese Falcon Three-Disc Special Edition (1941 & 1931 versions / Satan Met a Lady)

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The Maltese Falcon Three-Disc Special Edition (1941 & 1931 versions / Satan Met a Lady) (1936)

Actors: Bette Davis, Warren William, Alison Skipworth, Arthur Treacher, Marie Wilson
Directed By: William Dieterle, Jean Negulesco, Robert Clampett
Studio: Warner Home Video
Rating: Unrated
Run Time: 178 minutes
Theatrical Release Date: July 22, 1936
DVD Release Date: October 03, 2006
Format: DVD
Genres: Classics

Disc One:Sam Spade is a partner in a private-eye firm who finds himself hounded by police when his partner is killed whilst tailing a man. The girl who asked him to follow the man turns out not to be who she says she is and is really involved in something to do with the Maltese Falcon' a gold-encrusted life-sized statue of a falcon the only one of its kind.Disc Two:Adhering closely to Dashiel Hammett's story sleazy detective Sam Spade seeks the whereabouts of a jewel encrusted statuette and his partner's cold-blooded killer unaware the two quests may be related. Well received in its time today it looks like a dress-rehearsal for John Huston's definitive version made ten years later.Disc Three:Sardonic detective Shane thrown out of one town for bringing trouble heads for home and his ex-partner's detective agency. The business is in a sad way and Shane who has had the forethought to provide himself with a 250-dollar commission from an old lady on the train is welcomed with open arms. When pretty Valerie Purvis walks in the next day willing to pay over the odds to put a tail on the man who did her wrong Shane's way with the ladies looks like paying off yet again. But things start to go wrong when his partner is murdered and Shane himself comes home to find his apartment wrecked by a gentlemanly crook who comes back to apologise -- and to tell him a fascinating fairy-story about the fabled Horn of Roland that looks like not being so mythical after all. Miss Purvis wants protection. The police want answers. And all sorts of people want the 'French horn'... but Shane is one jump ahead of everyone all the way. Well almost.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: MYSTERY/SUSPENSE UPC: 012569676015 Manufacturer No: 67601

movie review

Amazon.com Editorial Review:
Still the tightest, sharpest, and most cynical of Hollywood's official deathless classics, bracingly tough even by post-Tarantino standards. Humphrey Bogart is Dashiell Hammett's definitive private eye, Sam Spade, struggling to keep his hard-boiled cool as the double-crosses pile up around his ankles. The plot, which dances all around the stolen Middle Eastern statuette of the title, is too baroque to try to follow, and it doesn't make a bit of difference. The dialogue, much of it lifted straight from Hammett, is delivered with whip-crack speed and sneering ferocity, as Bogie faces off against Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, fends off the duplicitous advances of Mary Astor, and roughs up a cringing "gunsel" played by Elisha Cook Jr. It's an action movie of sorts, at least by implication: the characters always seem keyed up, right on the verge of erupting into violence. This is a turning-point picture in several respects: John Huston (The African Queen) made his directorial debut here in 1941, and Bogart, who had mostly played bad guys, was a last-minute substitution for George Raft, who must have been kicking himself for years afterward. This is the role that made Bogart a star and established his trend-setting (and still influential) antihero persona. --David Chute