The Black Bird (1975)

A bkack & white still but the movie was in color.

A sequel to the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon (there were one or two earlier films based on it). Someone owned the movie rights and wanted to make a straight sequel, but the writers just couldn't do it so they wrote it as a comedy. Made 34 years after the first movie. I saw it listed in an old movie-related edition of the Guiness Book of World Records as the longest gap between an original movie and its sequel, although, since then, there was a made-for-TV sequel to Gone with the Wind and probably several others.

Lee Patrick reprises her role as Effie, Sam Spade's secretary, and Elisha Cook returns as Wilmer. Humphrey Bogart was only a couple of years older than they were. He would have been 75 when this movie was released and probably could have starred in it if he hadn't smoked his way to an early grave. So George Segal starred as Sam Spade, Jr, still employing his father's old secretary. I was disappointed that Elisha Cook didn't have a bigger role.

You know in the old movie when Wilmer tells Sam Spade to "shove off" and Sam warns him that "People lose teeth talking like that"? That scene was in the novel, but Wilmer apparently said "Fuck you". The way Dashiell Hammett had to put it in the book was, "The boy said two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second 'you'." 

In 1975, Wilmer could have said what he wanted, but the movie would have gotten an R rating. Ted Turner colorized The Maltese Falcon in the '80s, but if he really wanted to modernize it, he should have dubbed in the obscene language. 

Not really funny. It had a running gag about Sam Spade's last name being a racial slur. 

Free on Tubi.

The Hunt (Spain, 1966)

Never go rabbit hunting with pro-Franco Spaniards. 

If you want to see poor, innocent rabbits horribly killed and a lamb being skinned, this is the movie for you. It looked like a nice place. They go into a Spanish town that looked beautiful except they were skinning a lamb. 

Three middle age Spanish Civil War veterans and a younger fellow with a Polaroid go rabbit hunting. They were friends before this but don't seem to like each other.  

It was refreshing to see a .22 rifle as a murder weapon. People kill each other with them all the time in real life, but you never see that in movies.

Available on the Criterion Channel.