Any remake of the film, The Maltese Falcon, should reinterpret both Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy as having multiple personality

Throughout the story, the reader is repeatedly told about the two sides of Sam Spade’s personality and the changeability of Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

For example, in a meeting between Spade and Gutman (the fat man, on a quest for the falcon), Spade’s demeanor suddenly changes from calm and civilized to violent and primitive. In the movie with Humphrey Bogart, when Bogart leaves Gutman’s hotel suite, Bogart smiles in a way that suggests he had just been putting on a tough-guy act. But that interpretation is not in the novel.

In the novel, when Spade leaves Gutman’s suite, “His lips were dry and rough in a face otherwise pale and damp” and “he saw his hand trembling” (1, p. 112). Spade, seeing his hand trembling, does grin, but there is nothing in the text to confirm the movie’s interpretation of that grin. My interpretation is different.

Why does the text make a point of saying that Spade grinned, not because he knew that he had just put on a tough-guy act, but upon seeing that his hand was trembling? The text is describing what a person who has multiple personality does in order to figure out what must have happened during a memory gap. He is looking at his trembling hand and thinking that he must have had another of his episodes in which people have told him that he gets violent, but which he never remembers.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s changeability is pervasive in both the novel and the movie. Is it only because she is always, consciously and willingly, putting on an act and lying? Or does she, too, have multiple personality?

I think it is the latter, for two reasons. First, her changeability and lying are patently obvious to anyone who sees her under more than one circumstance. So her changes seem to be more provoked by circumstances (as in multiple personality) than well calculated. Second, her behavior at any one time can be extremely convincing, because people with multiple personality really believe that they are who they purport to be at that moment. This leads Effie, Spade’s secretary, who sees Brigid only in her help-seeking identity, to think that Brigid is trustworthy and worth saving. This leads Spade, who knows Brigid is a liar, to, nevertheless, admire and respond to how how convincing she can be.

Now, I don’t think that the above arguments, by themselves, are conclusive regarding multiple personality. What convinces me is what I discussed in the previous post on Sam Spade’s story about Flitcraft’s fugue. That story is such an odd thing to include in this detective story that it must have special significance.

What is Spade telling Brigid—and the reader—with the Flitcraft story? Not that life is random, but that Spade knows Brigid changes personalities, just like he does. And I think that any remake of the movie should consider this interpretation.

1. Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon. New York, Vintage, 1929/1992.