Movies from the 1940s

The Third Man (1949)

Although The Third Man is (famously) set in Vienna, and makes use of numerous locations around that city, much of the studio work and other shots were filmed in London.

This would apparently include at least some of the back projection footage made for the driving scenes. During the drives to and from the hospital near the end of the film, several London buses are visible on the road. (These wouldn’t be the famous Routemasters, though, as those weren’t introduced until the 1950s. They’re more likely to be an earlier model, known as the Regent.)

These kinds of things are often easier to make out in moving footage, but above you can clearly see the outline of a bus behind the brim of Martens’ hat, and on the right of the picture below, even the bus route is tantalisingly close to being legible.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The opening scroll from The Maltese Falcon is, sadly, completely made up. There was no real Maltese falcon, although the idea may have come from another magnificent bird, the Kniphausen Hawk, which was made in 1697 for a Count of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Kniphausen Hawk certainly fits the bill – or should that be beak? – being made of precious metal and encrusted with rare jewels. It’s silver rather than gold, though, and a good deal more lively than the falcon. The Kniphausen Hawk is part of the collection at Chatsworth House, and there’s a photograph of it here.

Several prop falcons were made for the movie, and these are themselves worth a fortune. There are two lead falcons known to exist, one of which sold in 1994 at auction for $398,500, and there’s at least one original prop made of resin. It’s often possible to tell which version is on screen at any given moment, as long as somebody’s holding it: the lead falcons weighed more than 20 kilos each!

Aside from the authentic prop falcons, there’s also a healthy trade in replica falcons of varying quality. Of these replicas, the most accurate one-off must be the one made by propmaker & Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage. He discusses the process, and a great deal more about the history of the falcon prop, in the video below. (First he talks about reconstructing a Dodo skeleton. It’s very interesting in its own right, but skip to 6:25 if you’re in a hurry and want the falcon story.)

Dark Passage (1947)

In Dark Passage, Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, a man wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder. At the start of the movie, he escapes from prison, and halfway through he gets plastic surgery to enable him to search for his wife’s killer without detection.

This gave the studio the problem of what to do about Humphrey Bogart in the early part of the film. After all, if Parry was going to look like Bogart after the surgery, he couldn’t very well look like him beforehand.

Rather than have another actor play Parry until the surgery, the filmmakers decided to use first-person camera, meaning that we see the world through Parry’s eyes, with the other characters addressing the camera directly, as Lauren Bacall does in the shot below.

As a result, Humphrey Bogart doesn’t appear on screen for almost 36 minutes, and even then his face is covered. The bandages don’t come off for almost an hour, meaning that Bogart’s face is visible for only the last forty minutes of the film.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Jack Warner at Warner Bros. saw the rushes, he baulked at the idea of paying for a star like Bogart and then using only his voice for the first half of the movie, but by then it was too late.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

The wealthy American tourist that Humphrey Bogart’s character keeps touching for cash in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is played by the film’s director, John Huston.

Apparently it was B. Traven, author of the original novel, who suggested that Huston play the cameo role: he’d seen the director handing out change during location scouting.

According to one rumour, Bogart took directing duties on these scenes, deliberately demanding repeated retakes in order to wind up Huston.

Citizen Kane (1941)

There’s a scene near the end of Citizen Kane where Kane and his wife through a lavish picnic on the beach in Florida. It’s an unsettling, eerie scene, rendered all the more so by the unusual appearance of their surroundings: it’s more swamp than beach, and those creatures flying across the background don’t quite look like birds…

That’s because they aren’t. This scene reuses a back projection originally created for King Kong (or possibly the sequel, Son of Kong), and the birds are in fact pterodactyls. There are two in the top centre of the frame above, although admittedly they’re easier to make out when they’re in motion. Watch out for them next time you see the movie.

One version of this story has it that RKO warned Welles about the presence of the creatures, and asked him to remove them, but that he decided to keep them in anyway.