1941’s The Maltese Falcon strengthened Humphrey Bogart’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most iconic stars, and thanks to its winning combination of rapid, smart dialog, femmes fatales, and brooding cinematography, it established many of the tropes and tricks that became the standards of film noir movies.
Bogart himself almost didn’t land a role in the film, with the studio, Warner Bros., preferring the role of Sam Spade instead go to George Raft. The movie itself, meanwhile, would likely not have been made at all if it weren’t for Bogart’s previous movie, High Sierra.
It had been written by Warner Bros. scriptwriter John Huston, who had asked its producers for a shot in the directors’ chair. They agreed, but on the condition that the next script Huston turned in prove to be a success; happily, that High Sierra turned out to be a box office smash and Warners’ were only too happy to give Huston free rein to direct his first picture.
Huston not only chose to direct The Maltese Falcon but adapted the screenplay himself from Dashiell Hammett’s classic 1930 novel; and in doing so, managed to outwit Hollywood’s ever more severe censorship rules.
Hammett’s novel had infamously referred to one of its characters as a “catamite”—an old-fashioned term for a young man kept in a homosexual relationship by an older, often more wealthy or powerful man.
That word, and that somewhat questionable relationship, was deemed far too salacious for 1940s cinema audiences, so in his script, Huston replaced the word with “gunsel,” which the censors at Warner Bros. wrongly presumed was merely another word for a sharpshooter. Gunsel was 1940’s slang for a hustler and largely referred to the same dubious relationship that Hammett had implied in his novel.
The Production Code censors, however, were entirely unaware of its connotations, and let it appear in the final cut of the movie without question.