The Gay Falcon (RKO, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After our disappointing and frustrating experience with Lifetime’s movie Lust, I broke open the two-volume boxed set of the entire series of movies made by RKO between 1941 and 1946 based on Michael Arlen’s character of The Falcon (t/n Gaylord Laurence, though he became Tom Laurence later in the series – GEorge sanders, the star of the series, wanted out of it and so RKO’s writers concocted a story in which Gay Lawrence would be killed and his brother Tom – played by Sanders’ real-life brother, Tom Conway – would take over). RKO had actually begun a similar series based on Leslie Charteris’ good-bad character The Saint in 1938, with The Saint in New York, and after a rather lame performance by Louis Hayward in that first film they decided to put the great George Sanders in the role … and a hit series was born.

Only in 1941 Charteris decided to revoke RKO’s license on the character, and with a popular series on their hands but no apparent way to continue it legally, RKO bought the rights to Michael Arlen’s novel The Gay Falcon and essentially transformed the Falcon into a clone of the Saint. The Gay Falcon was the only one of the series RKO actually based on a Michael Arlen novel – future installments in the series were either originals or based on novels by other writers (including Raymond Chandler, whose masterpiece Farewell, My Lovely was first purchased by RKO for a Falcon episode called The Falcon Takes Over – as film historian William K. Everson wrote, the result was a better-than-average series episode in which “some of Philip Marlowe’s integrity even seemed to rub off on the superficial Falcon” – and in 1944, with what later became known as film noir becoming a major commercial genre, RKO remade it superbly as Murder, My Sweet, with director Edward Dmytryk, writer John Paxton, and stars Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Mike Mazurki, Anne Shirley and Miles Mander all at the tops of their games).

After watching The Gay Falcon I can see why RKO didn’t tap any more of Arlen’s own stories for their films, since it’s surprisingly dull. Like a lot of the thrillers and non-gangster crime films Hollywood churned out between the advent of sound and the surprise success of The Maltese Falcon in 1941 (the best film of a Dashiell Hammett novel, the movie that established Humphrey Bogart as a good guy instead of a gangster, and the real beginning of the film noir cycle), The Gay Falcon is played as much or more for comedy than thrills. Gaylord Laurence (George Sanders) begins the movie under an ultimatum from his fiancée Elinor Benford (Anne Hunter, later for some reason known as Nina Vale) that he give up both other women and amateur detecting and become a responsible member of society. Laurence rents an office on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets and sets himself up as a stockbroker, with Jonathon “Goldie” Locks (Allen Jenkins) as his assistant – but neither of them ever do anything to attract people looking to buy or sell stocks. Instead Locke spends most of his time sleeping and Laurence looks across through an open window at a nice-looking and largely undressed woman in an adjoining room. “I said I wanted a view!” he tells Elinor when she calls him on it.

She wants him to go to a charity ball being sponsored by socialite Maxine Wood (Gladys Cooper) and he’s less than thrilled – until he learns that every time Wood gives a party at least one woman who attends loses some of her jewels to thieves. Laurence manages to trace a ring of jewel thieves working the parties, including Manuel Retana (Turhan Bey, who even in a frankly villainous role gets more character dimension than most people of color in classic Hollywood – at his home studio, Universal, he even got to play romantic leads and get the heroine at the end in films like The Mad Ghoul and Sudan) and various other not terribly menacing crooks. Finally, after meeting a new girlfriend, Helen Reed (Wendy Barrie, who’d worked with Sanders on some of the Saint films as well), and getting police inspector Mike Waldeck (Arthur Shields, who seems to be anticipating Barry Fitzgerald’s performance as the lead cop in The Naked City and playing a bit more sensitivity and giving a little more depth to the “Irish cop” stereotype than usual) to lock up both Elinor and Goldie Locks so he can solve the crime without them getting in the way, Laurence deduces that Maxine Wall is herself the leader of the ring that’s been stealing valuable jewels from her party guests.

It seems as if Arlen and the screenwriters, Frank Fenton and Lynn Root (who wrote most of the Falcon films regardless of whom RKO tapped for the story source), wanted to shock the audience with the sheer audaciousness of this reveal – “Imagine! A woman is the head of a crime ring!” – but not only do we have a quite different expectation of whether a woman can be in a position of power for good or ill than they did in 1941, the studios in general and RKO in particular pulled this one so often that by the time they did Dick Tracy’s Dilemma in 1947 and made the principal villain a woman who was hiring thugs to “steal” her jewels so she could report them stolen and collect insurance on them, it didn’t seem like a surprise at all.