John Huston

The Maltese Falcon might as well have been a dodo bird. No one had high hopes for the movie, which had two previous incarnations: a 1931 drama of the same name starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade and a comedy called Satan Met a Lady in 1936 starring Bette Davis (who called the movie "junk").

Those films were like the fake version of the Falcon found at the end of the 1941 film—lifeless hunks of iron. It took writer/director John Huston to transform the story into a dazzling work of art. Having worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. for a number of years, Huston took The Maltese Falcon as his directorial debut. It was a risk for Warner, who had already seen the book flop as a movie twice before.

But Huston Tim-Gunned the heck out of The Maltese Falcon and he made it work by adapting the book using a ton of Hammett's original, jaded, and witty dialogue and by meticulously storyboarding each scene. (We'd love to see The Maltese Falcon graphic novel.) With a small budget, the film was made in only eight weeks—quickly and efficiently, just as Sam Spade would like it. (Fun fact: Huston's own father, Walter Huston, has an uncredited cameo as the short-lived Captain Jacoby.)

Although the Falcon in the film turns out to be a dud, the film itself was anything but, and it launched a long, storied directorial career for Huston, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), which won him his first Academy Award, and Prizzi's Honor (1985), for which he directed his daughter, Anjelica.