{"id":3295,"date":"2023-08-26T14:30:28","date_gmt":"2023-08-26T21:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/?p=3295"},"modified":"2023-08-28T17:11:04","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T00:11:04","slug":"sam-spade-mug-shot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/sam-spade-mug-shot\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Spade Mug Shot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My friend Bill sent me a link to a Huffpost on the meme frenzy<\/a> following posting of P01135809’s mug shot in Atlanta. Here’s another collection<\/a>. Most of the memes are amusing, even side-splitting, but none of them notices the Sam Spade-Maltese Falcon connection, which happens to delight me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

P01135809’s mug shot is a study in Vs, like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade of the Maltese Falcon:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down\u2014from high flat temples\u2014in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I imagine P01135809 working on his pose in front of a mirror, modeling himself on Sam Spade. P01135809’s pale brown hair is flounced into a v and the v of his forehead lines, brows, and eyes meet at the point of another v that comes up from twin creases aimed toward the bridge of his nose. His lipless mouth and round chin underline the v’s pointing to his leering eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

P01135809 does not look ” rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” He has the “this ain’t nice” leer of someone who thinks he may have hatched a hemorrhoid or realized that his partner was killed by the bimbo with whom he thought he was falling in love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I consider The Maltese Falcon to be a masterwork, but I also see it as close to the light touch of Hammett’s most popularly successful work, The Thin Man, not the detective stories he wrote previously. I don’t see Sam Spade as the swashbuckling and justice-seeking hero he is often made out to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pursuit of the falcon is massive joke, a cavalcade of characters, portrayed comically in the 1941 John Huston movie<\/a> by the geniuses of Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lore. The global wild goose chase draws Spade in, only to dump him when the bird is revealed to be a fraud. In the end, Spade loses the falcon and sacrifices the femme fatale he may have loved only to avenge his dismal two-timing partner, Miles Archer, whom he didn’t much like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nice choice of models, P01135809.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Bill sent me a link to a Huffpost on the meme frenzy following posting of P01135809’s mug shot in Atlanta. Here’s another collection. Most of the memes are amusing, even side-splitting, but none of them notices the Sam Spade-Maltese Falcon connection, which happens to delight me. P01135809’s mug shot is a study in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Sam Spade Mug Shot”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[360,110],"tags":[414,413,412,411],"class_list":["post-3295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-society","tag-dashiell-hammett","tag-maltese-falcon","tag-mug-shot","tag-p01135809"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3295"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3321,"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295\/revisions\/3321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinemaple.net\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}