Surprising Catholic overtones in two classic Hollywood films

Just after Mary Astor converted to Catholicism, she starred in The Maltese Falcon (1941), premiering in New York City on October 3, 1941, two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

She had recently turned in an Oscar-winning performance (The Great Lie) and was on roll. So was Humphrey “Bogie” Bogart, who played, in what would be his breakout role, Sam Spade, a San Francisco private investigator. Spade runs interference on, and uncovers the chicanery of, three ruthless charlatans -- including Astor’s character, Ruth Wonderly/Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Spade’s femme fatale client (evidently a Catholic girl gone bad), who peddles phony stories. All the while everyone is in hot pursuit of the bejeweled gold falcon statuette.

As The Maltese Falcon opens, the scene is dramatically set with these intriguing words:

A live falcon (or was it really a jewel-encrusted golden falcon?) was the yearly tribute the Knights Hospitaller not Templars), who cared for religious pilgrims at their Jerusalem hospital, paid to Emperor Charles V on All Saints Day for granting them Tripoli, Malta and Gozo. In the movie the “Maltese Falcon” is a Hitchcockian “MacGuffin,” signaling something insignificant yet pivotal to the plot. In this case "the black bird" frames the suspenseful film, written and directed by John Huston in his directorial debut, based on the 1930 novel by Dashiell Hammett.

The Maltese Falcon, also starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, is a tour de force. At the time of its release, shady characters like theirs prowled big city streets filled with gangsters, addicts, and all-around-unscrupulous characters. The setting is far from the America Frank Capra created to boost morale as the country barreled towards World War II -- a war that began 400 years after the first tribute was paid to Charles V.

The Library of Congress considered The Maltese Falcon so “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” that it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, one of 25 films so honored.

Three years later, Astor starred in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), set in turn-of-the-century America, and likewise a National Film Registry top 25 pick. Director Vincente Minnelli described it as “a year in the life of a family,” i.e., the Smiths, including five children, a hardworking father, stay-at-home mother, and “Grandpa,” all living in a large Victorian mansion at 5135 Kensington Avenue in St. Louis. Told in four seasonal vignettes, the film starts in the summer of 1903, with an atmosphere charged with hopeful anticipation of the opening, the following spring, of the 1904 World’s Fair -- held in St. Louis to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. 

Like O’Shaughnessy, while hidden, the family is evidently Catholic. The fair increased the city’s already abundant Catholic population, after which St. Rose of Lima Church was expanded. And it’s good that the faith blossomed. While the rosy image presented in the film was the polar opposite of the gritty San Francisco streets depicted in The Maltese Falcon, the seeds of decay were also abundant.

Just five years earlier, in 1898, Friedr. Bayer & Co. had introduced heroin commercially as a “non-addictive” alternative to morphine, trademarking and marketing it until 1910. This opium derivative, was, of course, highly addictive and would soon bring poverty, crime and prostitution to the streets of America, including to New York City, San Francisco and St. Louis. By that time Margaret Sanger was beginning her crusade — opening up the first “birth control” clinic in America on October 16, 1916, in Brooklyn. Women snaked around the block to get free information and counsel — only to have police raid and shut clinic down nine days later. 

But the horse was already out of the barn. While in 1800, families on average had seven children, by the turn of the 20th century, that number had plunged to four. 

Thus, the seemingly idyllic era in which Meet Me in St. Louis was set, while not The Maltese Falcon, was certainly headed in that direction. With all the swirling irreligiousness, most virulently in Russia (highlighted in our last double feature), the clouds of World War I were inevitable. After that the “Roaring Twenties” unsurprisingly let loose and “what goes up must go down” ushered in the Great Depression and the world of The Maltese Falcon, setting the stage for an even bigger war.

Yet MGM’s production of this heart-warming St. Louis tale, filmed at the height of World War II, underscores just how strong families were at the time in spite of it all. Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Joan Carroll and Lucille Bremer as the sisters, and Mary Astor playing their mother, with equally strong leads playing the brother and father, delightfully embody this poignant year in the life of a turn-of-the-20th-century St. Louis family. Their children would go on to raise families whose sons and daughters secured freedom for the world, while characters like Bogie in The Maltese Falcon weeded out the bad guys.

Paraphrasing Spade’s famous line, “The stuff that dreams” — and great film and literature — “are made of.”  Saints, too.