Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a deceiver, murderer, and femme fatale.
She appears in the 1941 version The Maltese Falcon, written and directed by John Huston.
We meet Brigid at the beginning of the movie when Effie Perine (Lee Patrick), the receptionist for Same Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) announces that there is a girl named Wonderly here to see you.
Effie Perine: There's a girl wants to see you. Her name's Wonderly.
Sam Spade: Customer?
Effie Perine: I guess so. You'll want to see her anyway. She's a knockout.
Sam Spade: Shoo her in, Effie darling, shoo her in.
Miss Wonderly as it turns out is really Brigid O'Shaughnessy, who is a 1941 version of a knockout, thin as a rake with large wanton eyes and dressed in fox furs and wearing a small black velvet half hat with veil and feathers and a gown with puffed shoulders.
Brigid gives Sam Spade a fake name and tells him a fake story about her 17-year-old younger sister running off with a bad man Floyd Thursby.
Brigid plays the chaste Ingenue character to the hilt. Biting her lower lip and holding back tears while speaking to telling her story
Sam’s partner Miles Archer seeing Brigid (the 1940s knockout) wonders into the room jumps in to take the case.
After Brigid leaves, Archer and Spade talk.
Spade: What do you think of her?
Archer: Sweet. (guffaws suddenly) Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.
Miles Archer is shot dead
While on the case Miles is shot dead.
Spade is called by the policemen and shows up on the murder sight.
Later Spade finds out from the police that Floyd Thursby has also been shot and Spade is the suspect.
Miss Wonderly comes to live with Spade which, because of the heavy self-censorship of the time by the Hays office, is only hinted at.
Spade is now trying to clear his name and trying to solve the mystery of Archer and Thursby during the day while bedding the femme fatale behind both killings at night.
Sam and Brigid
Spade soon finds out that Brigid is involved with a group of evil men who are trying to get their hands on the Maltese Falcon, a golden statue of a falcon covered in lead to hide its value.
Spade figures out the scheme and is able to escape. His lover, Brigid pleads for her life but Spade unmoved turns her over to the police.
Trivia:
Samuel Dashiell Hammett 1894 –1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist.
Hammett was a private detective having worked for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency from when he left school when he was 13 years old.
Hammett had written and published over 30 short stories before he published The Maltese Falcon in 1929. The book as originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue.
This was the first appearance of Hammett’s main character Same Spade.
The Hays Code - The Motion Picture Production Code was the set of industry moral guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1934 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Will H. Hays, who was the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) from 1922 to 1945.
This version of the Maltese Falcon is the third remake.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy in the 1931 Maltese Falcon.
The Maltese Falcon (1931), the first version, a pre-Code production was also written by John Huston and starred Ricardo Cortez as a very charismatic Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Because of the Hays Code which were applied in 1934 in In 1936, Warner Brothers attempted to re-release the film but was denied approval by the Hays Production Code censors because of its "lewd" content. The affair between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy was made clear. Brigid was even seen taking a bubble bath in Sam’s apartment.
The next remake of The Maltese Falcon novel was entitled "Satan Was a Lady" and released in 1936. This was a more comical version of the story starring Bette Davis and Warren William, with Sam Spade becoming "Ted Shane". The film received poor reviews, and Davis later referred to the film as "junk".
John Huston remade the film after he had seen how poorly the first adaptation was. He though the 1931 movie was poorly cast and directed. Huston cast his old friend Humphrey Bogart in the lead role. Bogart was completely wrong for the part, in the book Sam Spade is tall and blond and Bogart isn’t, but Bogart was a very strong actor with a larger than life screen personality so most people today think of him as “the” prototype Sam Spade.
Mary Astor has very notorious reputation in her day. It is rumoured that John Huston was one of her many lovers.
The Maltese Falcon is considered to by one of the first Film Noir movies.