Because I had a couple of hours to go before my reading, I went back to my hotel room and started to read The Maltese Falcon. I had never read it, though I’d seen the movie once, long ago. It was good, and I ended up taking the book with me everywhere; I read it in the Indian buffet where I had a very late dinner; on the bus to the reading that night and on the way back; at Fisherman’s Wharf the next day; on the boat to Alcatraz; up at Coit Tower.
There was a bookplate on the inside cover with no name written on the line. I debated whether I ought to write my own name there. Normally, I didn’t like to write in books. Some of the calligraphic letters of the “Ex Libris” ended in flourishes that were meant to look like crows or ravens. I wondered: the Falcon had been covered in black enamel, supposedly to hide that it was gold underneath, but underneath the enamel was lead. Gutman hadn’t thought to look underneath the lead — he had just left the Falcon to Spade and O’Shaughnessy and walked out. Could it have been more difficult to encase the gold statue in lead than to make a new statue out of lead that was an exact replica of the original, gold statue? Either way, you’d have to go through the same process, wouldn’t you? No one had thought to check: What if there was gold underneath that lead? What if they had found what they were looking for after all, but it had been disguised so well they hadn’t realized it? What’s a better disguise for something valuable than something worthless disguised as something equally worthless?
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The most devastating line in The Maltese Falcon is also the most autobiographicaclass="underline" “He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.” Could Hammett’s wife really have failed to read what was meant?
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We are all more or less public figures, it’s only the number of spectators that varies.
(Saramago, The Double)
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My wife and I fought once late at night, long after we had fallen asleep. One of us woke the other by accident: I thought she had kicked me awake and she thought I had shaken her awake. If I did, it was because she had kicked me. That’s what began it. Though it started with who woke who, it moved on to other things, I can’t say what — I wasn’t completely awake at the time and now I can’t remember — but I do remember that it was very contentious. For the first and only time, my wife (rather than I) left to sleep on the couch, and I became even angrier when I heard her snoring a few minutes later. How could she sleep at a time like this? I fumed, alone, in our bed.
The next day, I rode the MAX downtown to the Central library. This was in the days of Fareless Square, when one could ride the MAX to the library for free. I fell asleep on the train somehow, just for a few moments but long enough to wake completely disoriented. Worried I had already missed my stop, I immediately got off, as it turned out, a stop too soon, at Pioneer Square. I stumbled out of the train, trying to make my way through the crowd of people trying to get on the train. Directly in front of me, even walking toward me through the crowd, was a man who looked exactly like me. I stopped dead in my tracks. It wasn’t until a man shoved past me, a man with a bike who had waited for me to decide what direction I was going in and then lost his patience, that I realized that I was not looking at another man at all, but at my (exceptionally clear) reflection in the full-length glass of the Starbuck’s kiosk. Naturally, I put this down to a lack of sleep.
Many months later, I had a similar experience in San Francisco’s Union Square, except that I had slept well the night before, and what had been in Pioneer Square just a reflection was, in Union Square, not.
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[INT. Argosy Bookshop (DUSK)]
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Scottie and Midge enter Pop Liebel’s Argosy Bookshop at dusk, according to the script, and the sun sets while they talk with Liebel. Making the sun seem to set and the light disappear was tricky because the interior of the bookshop is actually a set, on a soundstage somewhere in Los Angeles, and so the San Francisco street scene we see outside of it is not outside of it at all; it is another piece of film, rear-projected onto a screen behind the set. The lighting on the set had to be matched to this other piece of film while the scene was being shot and then gradually dimmed while shooting was going on, all while presenting the actors and the set the way Hitchcock wanted them presented, no simple feat. And if the light on the set at any given moment didn’t quite match the light on that piece of film, the whole scene would have to be shot again. If the actors flubbed a line, the scene would have to be shot again, and again, the lighting would have to be matched. If someone on the set coughed, if someone walked in front of the camera, if a truck passed by outside, if the boom mic got in the shot, if any one of a thousand things went wrong, the scene would have to be shot again, and again the lighting would have to be matched. Shooting on location, especially at that time, presented its own share of difficulties, but this inconsequential effect seems excessive to me — how much simpler to just have the scene take place during the day, when one lighting scheme could be used throughout, or during the night, when, again, a single lighting scheme could have been used, instead of this borderland between the two necessitating such a complicated lighting scheme. This is one of many places in his films where Hitchcock, whether intentionally or not, highlights the artificiality of what he is doing, of what we are watching.
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At 00:33:50, the first shot of the Argosy, Midge and Pop Liebel in the background could easily pass for Kim Novak (note the gray coat, mimicking the gray suit) and Alfred Hitchcock.
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Pop Liebel’s Argosy Bookshop is, in reality, the Argonaut Book Shop, located on Sutter Street between Jones and Taylor, four blocks west-northwest of Union Square. The street scene projected onto the screen behind the set is thus very close to the spot where Scottie will follow Judy to after seeing her for the first time, “Sutter Street near Leavenworth,” i.e., one block west of the Argonaut. Both the fake Argosy and the real Argonaut specialize in California history; any further west than this spot in the city, the film seems to say, and everything is an invented history, a fakery, a hoax. Or should I be looking at it as one would a negative? Do I have it backward? Is the history invented and the hoax fact?
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Cinema provided [a] lens for seeing truly and for seeing what could not truly have been seen before. Many early films, like those of the quick-change artist and impersonator Leopoldo Fregoli, were devoted to the disrobing of false identities, the unveiling of deceptions.