Sam Spade - Portrayals

Portrayals

Spade was a new character created specifically by Hammett for The Maltese Falcon; he had not appeared in any of Hammett's previous stories. Hammett says about him:

Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not — or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague — want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.

From the 1940s onward, the character became closely associated with actor Humphrey Bogart, who played Spade in the third and best-known film version of The Maltese Falcon. Though Bogart's slight frame, dark features and no-nonsense depiction contrasted with Hammett's vision of Spade (blond, well-built & mischievous), his portrayal was well-received, and is generally regarded as an influence on both film noir & the genre's archetypal private detective.

Spade was played by Ricardo Cortez in the first film version in 1931. Despite being a critical and commercial success, an attempt to re-release the film in 1936 was denied approval by the Production Code Office due to the film's "lewd" content. Since Warner Bros. could not re-release the film, a second version was made. For the 1936 comedy Satan Met a Lady, the central character was renamed Ted Shane and was played by Warren William. The film was a notable box office bomb.

On the radio, Spade was played by Bogart in a 1943 Screen Guild Theater production and a 1946 Academy Award Theater production. He was also played by Edward G. Robinson in a 1943 Lux Radio Theatre production. A 1946-1951 radio show called The Adventures of Sam Spade (on ABC, CBS, and NBC) starred Howard Duff (and later Steve Dunne) as "Sam Spade" and Lurene Tuttle as Spade's devoted secretary "Effie Perrine", and took a considerably more tongue-in-cheek approach to the character.

George Segal played Sam Spade, Jr., son of the original, in the 1975 film spoof, The Black Bird. The Black Bird was panned by both critics and audiences alike. Peter Falk delivered a more successful spoof the following year as "Sam Diamond" in Neil Simon's Murder by Death."

In 2009, with the approval of the estate of Dashiell Hammett, the veteran detective-story writer Joe Gores published Spade & Archer: The Prequel to Dashiell Hammett's THE MALTESE FALCON with Alfred A. Knopf, the original publisher of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.