As The Maltese Falcon turns 75 we unravel the mystery surrounding one of the most sought after items in both fictional movie history and real movie history, including how it relates to one of the biggest unsolved murders in Hollywood.
The Maltese Falcon, ripped from the pages of Dashiell Hammett’s story. As Sam Spade so famously put it, it’s “the stuff dreams are made of”. As far as production studio Warner Brothers is concerned, officially, there is one falcon which is made out of lead. It was sold as one of the most expensive movie props in history for over $4 million at auction.
But there are many who doubt this was the actual falcon. In fact many people doubt that there is just one falcon. They believe that the $4 million lead bust that was sold at auction definitely wasn’t one of them and that the truth behind the real falcons, six in total, is far grander and far stranger.
The story centers around oddball internet entrepreneur, and avid collector of many things, Hank Risan. Risan believed he had stumbled across three of them in one of his many antique trades in the 1980s. After years of research, insurance appraisals and meetings with people who worked at Warner Brothers around, or on, the set of the original film he came to believe that his were genuine. But he needed to be sure; and there were doubts.
His main cause for concern was the number of other falcons that were, and still are, circulating on the market. As well as Risan’s there was of course the lead model, a slightly less heavy resin model and even a solid gold replica encrusted with priceless jewels. Risan’s were plaster and therefore more likely to have been used on a movie set, however they had a strange marking at their base which appeared to read “7.5”.
He believed this could be a reference to a spoof of the original 1941 film, The Black Bird, from 1975. But he couldn’t be sure. His research unearthed that the marking was not a serial number and Warner Brothers didn’t start putting serial numbers on their props until the 60s. This helped his case. He also discovered that the busts made for the spoof were significantly different to the ones he owned but it still didn’t explain what the “7.5” was in reference to.
The oral surgeon who sold the $4 million lead version vehemently denies the validity all of this by the way, one couldn’t imagine why, and his threats of legal action caused Risan to lose interest for over a decade. When reappraising his busts, however, thanks to the power of the internet some startling revelations came to light. Revelations related to perhaps the greatest unsolved murder case in Hollywood history. The Black Dahlia. This is where it gets really weird.
Using a previously non-existent Google search on all things Maltese Falcon Risan became aware of a book written by a former detective, Steve Hodel, which postulated that his own deceased father was in fact the Dahlia murderer and that he had an accomplice. An artist named Fred Sexton. This part was of little interest to Risan, what was of interest was a throwaway line Hodel included asserting that Sexton hung out in a close circle of Hollywood artists, including director John Huston, and that Huston had Sexton design the original falcon. If Risan could find out who made the falcon he could be one step closer to finding out if his was the real deal.
He searched desperately for any info on Sexton but found little. He scoured galleries for prints of his work, hoping to find some design similarities, but came up short. He came across an unsold print from an artist with a similar name and, hoping against hope that it had been misappropriated, bought it anyway. It not only turned out that Risan was right, the painting had been misappropriated, it turned out that “7.5” had been a red herring all along. After seeing Sexton’s signature at the bottom of the painting he discovered that the inscription on his falcon didn’t read “7.5” at all - it read “F.S” for Fred Sexton.
Risan tracked down Sexton’s daughter and confirmed not only the validity of the signature but that Sexton had in fact known John Huston since high school and that he was commissioned to design the eponymous falcon. She had even met Bogart on set. So - case closed, right? Sadly, in the world of film noir, nothing is ever that simple. The tale was just a little too tall and a little too weird for most people on the collector scene, the lead falcon sold for $4 million and the plaster falcon failed to meet its asking price.
Officially Warner Brothers says the lead model is the real falcon. Unofficially Warner Brothers takes a far more reasonable stance, which is that nobody really knows the truth and nobody likely ever will. Many people agree that making a movie prop out of lead is a little, well, insane even for 1940s standards and if the “true” falcons were made from a plaster mold then any number could have been made. Like the Dahlia case, too much time has passed. There will always be theories that make more sense than others. But we’ll never really know for sure. Just as Huston’s original film, as enveloping today as it was 75 years ago, proves - we all love a good mystery.
You can read the original, and brilliant, detective work done by Bryan Burrough of Vanity Fair here: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/mystery-of-the-maltese-falcon
