Not long ago, my fiancee and I had the pleasure of going out to see The Maltese Falcon on the big screen. You have to take advantage of opportunities like that if you’re going to make living in New York worth the effort. Anyway, while I was watching it, I had an interesting thought: if Dashiell Hammett is looking down from Writer’s Heaven, between knocking back shots with Hemingway, he’s probably laughing his ass off at how he’s put one over on four generations of censors.
Twice in the movie, Sam Spade calls another character a “gunsel”. This is because the pulp magazine that published the original serialized novel wouldn’t allow vulgarities, so Sam couldn’t swear. But if you look up “gunsel“, it doesn’t mean “hired gun” or “thug” like you might think. If that long-ago editor knew what he was printing (and those Golden Age of Hollywood censors knew what they were allowing to be said onscreen), they might have preferred to let Sam swear…