10 Movies You Didn’t Know Were Remakes

The Maltese Falcon – The Maltese Falcon/The Devil Was A Lady

Most film buffs know John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett. The film has featured in numerous AFI lists, been played countless times on TCM, and usually pops up on best-of lists as one of the greatest film noirs. So it may surprise you to learn that The Maltese Falcon was not the first adaptation of Hammett’s novel; it wasn’t even the second.

The original Maltese Falcon premiered in 1931, a pre-Code film that stayed remarkably close to the plot of the book, including violence and homosexual overtones with which the 1941 version could not grapple. Unfortunately, it was later shelved for “lewdness,” and vanished from cinemas.

The next adaptation was The Devil Was A Lady, a comedic version that starred Bette Davis in 1936. When Huston finally got ahold of the book and Humphrey Bogart became Sam Spade, film history was made. It’s worth looking at the other two versions, though, if only to see what Huston got right.