Yankee Fire Brigades vs. Catholics in Boston’s Riot on Broad Street

 

Generic early 19th Century depiction of rioting/street brawl represents the kind of melee that erupted on Boston's Broad Street in  1837.

It began, as so many unpleasant things do, with a traffic jam of sorts.  It was June 11, 1837 and the place was Boston a/k/a the Hub of the Universe.  After fighting a fire in neighboring Roxbury the volunteer firefighters of Fire Engine Company 2020 stopped at a saloon to wash the smoke out of their throats.  After refreshing themselves they departed to make their way back to the station.  They found their way blocked by a passing Irish funeral parade.  An outraged fireman, named George Fey began cursing at the mourners then took a shove at one of them.  Instantly a melee erupted and quickly escalated as paving stones were hurled and all manner of makeshift weapons, including the brigade’s fire axes, were deployed.

Fire Captain W. W. Miller ordered his men to make a run for the firehouse.  When they got there, Miller sounded an alarm that called out all the city’s fire brigades.  Those heroes rushed to join Company 20 to return to the scene of the initial fight.  By that time the funeral procession had passed but the commotion had attracted a crowd which the firefighters immediately attacked.

It was called the Broad Street Riot and became the greatest street disturbance in the city’s history.  About 1000 people on both sides engaged in a furious street battle.  Fire fighters chased their foes inside some homes which were then systematically smashed up.  Although no one was known to be killed outright, fighting went on for hours.

                                 

                                     Mayor Samuel Atkins Eliot, a prominent Unitarian, called out the Militia to quell the riot.

It was broken up when Mayor Samuel Atkins Eliot—Unitarians will recognize the name as a member of that faith’s most distinguished family—who was on the scene of the original fire, arrived with 10 companies of militia he hastily called out.  The violence was quelled, but not the simmering rage boiling between the immigrant Catholic Irish and Boston’s working class Protestants.  The fine lads of the fire brigades, you see, were all recruited among the city’s Protestant laborers, apprentices, and shop clerks.  No Irish need apply.

Boston, founded by Puritans, had a tradition of rabid anti-Catholicism stretching back well before the American Revolution.  It was then the custom for gangs of apprentices and laborers to gather every year on Guy Fawkes Day—called locally Pope Day—for parades bearing effigies of the Pope to be burned.  Gangs from the North and South sides would customarily run into each other and engage in a semi-ritualistic brawl between them.  All of this in a city virtually bereft of any actual Catholics, except whatever seamen might be lounging around the port. It took a shrewd organizer, Samuel Adams, to transform these street hooligans into the muscle of the Sons of Liberty.

After the Revolution when Boston’s municipal volunteer fire companies were organized, they were drawn from the same pool.

Volunteer fire brigades like this one required a lot of manpower to pull the engine through the streets, handle hoses and bucket brigades, and tear down burning walls.  The men in Boston were recruited among Protestant apprentices, laborers, and street toughs and were idolized in their community.

Boston recovered as a major port and trading center.  By the turn of the 19th Century it was beginning to attract immigrants, especially from Ireland, seeking work.  Most of them were Catholics.  There was plenty of work and whatever resentment the locals might have been kept in check by prosperity.  But President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo on trade with warring European powers and the War of 1812 all but destroyed Boston’s commerce and led to a regional depression.  Tensions mounted between Yankees and Micks.  Street brawls became common.

The first ever public Catholic Mass in Boston was not held until 1788.  In 1803 the Catholics were numerous and prosperous enough to open Holy Cross Church, designed by the same architect—Charles Bulfinch—who was building the city’s impressive churches for the Standing Order.   By 1808 there were enough Catholics—the vast majority of the Irish—to establish the Diocese of Boston. The first Bishop was Jean Cheverus, a refugee from the French Revolution. 

After the War of 1812, commerce resumed, and so did prosperity.  New waves of immigrants arrived.  Catholics began building not only churches but other institutions—a convent and schools.  This rapid rise of Catholics in their midst inflamed the Protestant Clergy as much as job competition inflamed the working class.  Denouncing insidious Popery in thundering terms became common on Sunday mornings and the city’s several religious periodicals could be relied on for more.

No matter how theologically liberal the Boston clergy were—and most of them were very liberal religiously and would soon formally break from the Calvinist Standing Order and become openly Unitarian—few of its members could resist the siren call of anti-Popery.  Rhetoric heated up which seemed to give a sanction to anti-Catholic street violence.

As fire brigades stood by a Protestant mob burned the Ursuline Convent and Girl's Academy.

Things really blew up in 1834 in Charleston—now the Somerville neighborhood of Boston—home to a large population of working class Protestants.  It was also the site of a Convent of Ursuline Nuns, and the academy for girls that they operated.  Since no other equivalently high quality education was available to girls in Boston, many of the city’s Unitarian elite enrolled their daughters there, regardless of warnings from their ministers.  In 1834 the school had 47 students, only six of whom were Catholic.  The neighborhood Protestants resented both Catholics and the haughty Bostonian elite.

Rumors circulated of Protestant girls being “sold” to the convent.  Then in August word began to circulate about a nun who possibly wanted to leave the convent but was prevented from doing so.  Inflamed by a circular calling on the citizenry to intervene to free the mysterious woman, a mob gathered on the evening of August 11.  Early the next morning they rushed the convent with torches and burning tar barrels.  The nuns and students barely had time to escape and hide in the garden while the building was vandalized then set on fire.  Responding fire brigades not only refused to extinguish the flames, but they joined the rioters.  The building burned to the ground in two hours.

The following morning Mayor Theodore Lyman convened a meeting at Faneuil Hall to try to calm the situation and instigate an investigation into the arson.  Bishop Benedict Fenwick called another meeting about the same time at Holy Cross, now officially a cathedral at which he tried to keep the outraged Irish from pouring into the streets to seek revenge.  He was largely successful.

But a new Protestant mob assembled and marched first to Faneuil Hall with the intent of breaking up the Mayor’s meting and then on to the Cathedral.  They were foiled at both points by a Militia guard.  After failing to procure arms from the guarded arsenal they proceeded on to the Convent.  In a frenzy as the Convent itself still smoldered the mob destroyed the gardens and orchards, set bonfires, and pulled down fences before exhausting their fury.

The city’s clergy were divided by the convent riot.  Orthodox ministers including Lyman Beecher, soon to rise to fame as a leading abolitionist either openly cheered the rioters or found excuses for their actions in supposed Catholic immorality and exploitation of pure womanhood.  The city’s Unitarian divines generally decried the violence but refrained from any action or speech which could be considered coming to the defense of Catholics.  The only sympathy came from Bishop Fenwick’s personal friend, the Universalist Hosea Ballou, himself an outcast from the local religious establishment.

The self-confessed ring leader of the riot, John R. Buzzell and a dozen others were charged and brought to trial, but Buzzell boasted:

The testimony against me was point blank and sufficient to have convicted twenty men, but somehow I proved an alibi, and the jury brought in a victory of not guilty, after having been out for twenty-one hours.

In the end only one defendant, a 16-year-old boy seen burning a book after the main arson, was convicted.  The boy had no attorney and not a friend in the world.  He became a safe designated scape goat and was sentenced to life in prison.  That sentence was so manifestly unjust and out of line that Bishop Fenwick and Mother Superior Sister Mary St. George joined 5,000 local citizens petitioning for a commutation of sentence for the boy.  He was eventually released.

Catholic demands for restitution for the failure of authorities to protect their property kept the memory of the Convent Riot alive in both communities as the Boston City Council, Charleston Town Meeting, the County of Middlesex, and the Massachusetts legislature all considered and rejected claims year after year.

Anti-Catholic cartoons like this kept Protestant workers inflamed.

Tensions between Catholics and Protestants remained high.  Then in January of 1836 Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed was published and became an instant best seller.  In fact, it was said to be the mostly widely read American book between Parson Weems’s spurious biography of George Washington and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  The book was a pot boiler novel supposedly written by Maria Monk, a young woman who had escaped from a convent.  It told a hair-raising story of sexual exploitation.  The book, since proven to be almost total fabrication, fueled new waves of anti-Catholicism and led directly to the emergence of the Know Nothings, a rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant secret society and political party.

Given this kind of history, the Broad Street Riot comes clearly into focus.  Fourteen Irish and four Protestants were brought to trial.  Like the earlier Convent Riot, no Protestants were convicted.  The four Irish were all sentenced to terms in the workhouse.

The riot did cause Mayor Eliot to institute two reforms.  First, he established a paid Fire Department under the authority of the Mayor and Council.  The volunteer brigades were abolished, although almost all of the members of the new professional Department were drawn from their ranks.  Second, he established a Day Police to supplement the existing Night Watch. The two were soon merged into the Boston Police Department.  Recruitment into the new department came mostly from the Irish community.  The Fire and Police Departments remained largely segregated for decades.

Two versions of the riot were told and kept alive in their communities.  The popular version among working class Protestants was that the fire brigade was rushing to a fire when blocked by arrogant Irish mourners who would not let them pass.  In some versions children or whole families perished in the flames.  It was manifestly not true. 

That did not stop it from being believed and the story is retold to this day. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a popular Ska and proto-punk band in the 1990’s sang:

The Boston fire-fighting volunteers

 On their way to fight a fire somewhere

Met with a funeral procession

Proceeding way too slow

A brownstone burns out of control

We need to lay to rest this soul

Loggerheads on Broad Street Eye to eye and toe to toe

Broad Street’s just not broad enough

And you just don’t love God enough…

A new wave of immigrants arrived in the 1840’s spurred by the Irish Potato Famine, and the flood gates of Europe opened up after the Civil War.  Catholics gained a majority in the city population and led by Irish politicians seized the City government, a move as bitterly resented by the class of Unitarian Brahmins who were used to running things as by the still large Protestant working class.

Meanwhile the enthusiasm for reform among the intellectual elite of Boston tended to grow in direct proportion to the growing Irish Catholic population.  Early support for moderation in alcohol use was transformed into a temperance movement aimed squarely at the taverns of the scary, rowdy Irish.  Free public education was supported as a counter to the Catholic’s system of parochial schools.  Compulsory public schooling was at first meant to close the Catholic schools and place children into public schools where they would be inoculated with Protestant values.  Crusades for decency and morality in entertainment were aimed at popular amusements.  What Do-gooders saw as reform, the working class Irish recognized as a cultural attack upon them.

Late 19th Century resentments resulted the persistence of the No Irish Need Apply signs still frequently seen in shops and factories.  The politics of Boston and those signs would be bitterly remembered by Joseph P. Kennedy when he became a fabulously rich man married to a daughter of the former Boston Mayor John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.  He inoculated his sons, and by extension their children with a resentment of the WASP elite, and a determination to prove themselves better than any of them.

Members of the almost all Irish Boston Police Department leave a 1919 strike meeting.  WASP governor Calvin Coolidge crushed the strike with National Guard troops and banned the strikers for life from any public employment souring still strong resentments in Boston's Irish Southie community that have lingered to this day.

While Protestant/Catholic relations improved across much of the nation, and as Irish Americans established themselves in politics and the professions, the old strains eased in most places.  But not in Boston.  The Irish found themselves “put in their place” when Governor Calvin Coolidge, a quintessential WASP, crushed the strike by the virtually all Irish Boston Police in 1919, banning every man for life from public service.  Many of those men, unable to find work, would make their close-knit South Boston neighborhood—Southie—a bastion of bank robbers, cartage thieves, and gangsters to this day.

If the Irish in Boston hold resentments to this day, the Protestants have not been shining examples of brotherhood.  The Unitarian’s Beacon Press continued to publish virulent anti-Catholic screeds well into the 1950’s.  Unitarian Universalist ministers generally supported Boston school desegregation in the ‘60s and ‘70s including forced bussing which was voraciously—and occasionally violently—opposed by the Irish of Southie and were often harsh in characterizing the opposition as racist.

More recently conflicts over abortion rights, LGBT rights, and marriage equality, along with the continued clergy sex abuse scandals in the Church, has stoked new criticism of the Church.

A Boston Police sergeant--by the look of him, Irish--guards Black teens boarding school busses in compliance with a court ordered desegregation plan.  They would be greeted by angry crowds and rioting in the same Southie neighborhood where the cop probably lived.  Resentment over "forced busing" and liberal recriminations of racism kept Catholic/Protestant relation inflamed in Boston.

Today in most parts of the country with heavily Catholic populations, large proportions—often majorities—of local Unitarian Universalist congregations—are made up of former Catholics.  But not so much in Boston, and especially not among the Boston Irish.  Disgruntled liberal former Catholics would generally go anywhere to worship before they would set foot in a congregation of those they see as their ancient tribal enemies.

It seems some street brawls never really end.

Planting the Stars and Stripes in Asia--The Korean War They Didn't Teach You

 

A Korean map of the Hermit Kingdom.  The Han is the second major river from the south pictured on the map, the water way to the capital Hanyang (modern Seoul.)

A fat book could be made of forgotten and neglected American foreign wars or interventions. Take the war in Korea, for instance.  No, not the one when Harry Truman sent American forces to try to repel an invasion of the South by the Communist North in 1950, although I know veterans of that conflict have taken to calling it a forgotten war.  No, I have in mind an action nearly 80 years earlier.  Never heard of it?  Well pull up a stool and I will tell you all about it.

In American military and naval annals, it is listed, mostly as a footnote, as the United States Expedition to Korea of 1871.  It is best remembered as the first foreign conflict in which Medals of Honor were awarded.  The Koreans, who have a keener memory of such things, call it the Shinmiyangyo.

Korea in the late 19th Century was one of the most isolated nations on earth.  The history of this peninsular nation in northern Asia was a tragic one of repeated invasions or attempted invasions by neighboring China, Japan, and Manchuria.  The response of the ruling Joseon Dynasty which came to power in 1392 and had ruled and shaped the nation as a Confusion culture and state, was extreme isolationism—a virtual exclusion of all contact and trade with the rest of the world.  That policy was being tested again by pressure from Japan, the introduction of Catholicism by missionaries in the late 18th Century, and demands of European powers for concessions and trade privileges.  

In 1866 after eight fruitless week of battle a French expeditionary force failed to capture the citadel of Gsnghwua and was forced into a humiliating withdrawal.

In 1866 the French launched a punitive expedition against Korea in retaliation for a massacre of Catholics that included French Priests and to demand trade concessions.  A sizable French force landed on the fortress island of Ganghwa which guarded the approach to the capital of Hanyang, modern day Seoul.  After six weeks of fighting, the French were ignominiously forced to withdraw.  The ruling Joseon Dynasty, previously weakened by internal dissent was strengthened and but also deluded about its military capacity.  It re-affirmed its isolation and in the West became known as the Hermit Kingdom.

As for the United States, having spanned its own continent and emerged united from the Civil War, the country continued to look westward to the Pacific all the way to the shores of Asia to expand its influence and to secure free and equal access to the trade of all Asian ports.  Spurred on by the Navy, a force in search of a mission to keep it afloat in peace time, the government followed a policy to open trade relations with all nations and to check the growing power of its greatest rival the British Empire with its strong presence in China and naval superiority.

The first catalyst of the U.S action against Korea was the fate of the General Sherman, an American side wheel commercial steamer that was hired by an English firm in China to try to open trade with Korea in 1866, the same year as the French adventure.  The belligerent American captain of the ship would not take a refusal to allow it to dock and captured Korean officials sent to inform him of the government policy.  He then tried to move upriver firing cannons as he went.  The Koreans rallied and after several days of fighting and the loss of several junks, the General Sherman was destroyed and her surviving crew taken captive—and were likely executed.

Also of official concern was the possible fate of Americans who were shipwrecked in Korean waters, although in the one confirmed case, the survivors were well treated and sent to China from where they could be repatriated.  Finally, the U.S. sought to open Korean ports and sign a trade agreement.

The iron hulled and screw propelled steam frigate the USS Colorado was the flagship of the American squadron on the 1871 Korean expedition.

Early April 1871 what might be called a heavily muscular diplomatic mission set sail for Korea.  In Command was Rear Admiral John Rogers on board the USS Colorado, the flagship of the Navy’s Asiatic Squadron.  It was an iron-hulled three masted steam screw frigate which had seen service in the Civil War.  On board to handle negotiations was Frederick F. Low, the United States Ambassador to China.  Also in the squadron were four other warships—the sloop of war USS Alaska, the armed tug USS Palos, the side-wheel gunboat USS Monocacy, and the screw sloop USS Benicia. 

Admiral Rogers might be forgiven if he envisioned having the success and glory the Commodore Mathew Perry found in opening trade with Japan in 1854.

 "Men in white" were encountered by Admiral Roger's crew.  These Korean officials later taken captive were photographed on the deck of the Colorado in their traditional attire.

On June 1st Rogers arrived in Korean waters and successfully put men ashore to attempt to contact authorities.  The crew reported encountering “men in white” who were reluctant to talk to him or take any message to the Emperor in his capital of Hanyang.  Rogers’s men ashore reportedly politely told the Koreans that they would be exploring the area and “meant no harm.”

The Admiral then led his ships to the entry of the Han River leading to the capital—where foreign ships were explicitly forbidden to go.  The flotilla came under ineffective cannon fire from fortresses on Ganghwa.  The ships were not badly damaged, due “to the bad gunnery of the Coreans, whose fire, although very hot for the fifteen minutes in which they maintained it, was ill-directed, and consequently without effect.”

Rogers hotly demanded an official apology for the “unprovoked attack” and gave the Koreans a ten-day deadline to reply.  When those days lapsed, he quickly swung into action with a punitive raid on Ganghwa Island.

A council of war on board the USS Colorado.  Admiral John Rodgers is the one leaning over the chart.

On June 10 hostilities began with an attack on the lightly defended Choji Garrison on the Salee River.  The Koreans, members of the Tiger Hunters led by General Eo Jae-yeon were crudely armed with matchlock muskets which had been obsolete for nearly a hundred years in the West.

A force of 546 sailors and 105 Marines were put ashore to move on other objectives supported by 12-pound howitzers and guns from the flotilla.  They quickly moved on and captured Deokjin Garrison, and Deokjin Fort, which they found abandoned.  The Koreans fell back and regrouped at the well-fortified citadel of the Gwangseong Garrison.  As the Americans advanced on the fort an attempt to flank it was repulsed.

American forces established strong artillery batteries on two hills overlooking the fort which was pounded by extensive shelling abetted by fire from the USS Monocacy operating close to shore in shallow Han River waters.  

U.S. Sailors stormed the citadel of Gwangseong in heavy hand to hand fighting.

Navy Lt. Hugh McKee led a charge on the damaged fort.  The Korean defenders with their slow loading matchlocks were hardly able to get off a single volley of fire before McKee reached the top of the wall leading his troops. He was felled by a ball immediately.  Right behind him Commander Winfield Scott Schley personally shot the Korean who had wounded McKee.  Several seamen rushed to the aid of McKee, fatally wounded in the groin.  Meanwhile two Marines, Corporal Charles Brown of the USS Colorado’s guard and Private Hugh Purvis of the USS Alaska’s guard captured the personal flag of Eo Jae-yŏn and Private James Dougherty shot and killed the General.  Carpenter Cyrus Hayden, a sailor from the USS Colorado planted the American Flag on the ramparts under heavy fire.

Korean dead in the breached citadel.

The whole battle for the fortress lasted 15 minutes from the breach of the walls.  The surviving garrison, including the deputy commander, was taken prisoner.  In all of the action that day the Koreans lost 243 dead and 20 captured, most of them wounded.  American losses were three dead, including McKee, and ten wounded.

It was a brilliant military victory, especially considering that the Americans accomplished in a single day what the French had failed to do in six weeks.

Despite the military glory, the diplomatic mission ended in abject failure.  Rogers tried to use his prisoners as bargaining chips to demand negotiations with the Koreans.  The Koreans, for their part, flatly refused to negotiate, or even to take back the prisoners, who they considered traitors for surrendering.  The squadron stood off Korean waters until July 1 fruitlessly waiting to begin talks.  Frustrated and with fuel for his ships running low, Rogers had to break off contact and return with his primary objectives unmet.  In the end Rogers left as empty handed as the French.

Korean Headquarters Flag captured  by Marines Private Hugh Purvis, Corporal Charles Brown, and Captain McLain Tilton on board the USS Colorado after the battle.

The U.S. was unable to establish relations with Korea until 1886, after the Japanese forcibly opened trade there and the British had extracted concessions.

Nine sailors and six Marines including McKee, Brown, Purvis, Dougherty, Hayden, and three sailors who came to the aid of McKee were awarded the Medal of Honor.  Admiral Rogers never found the fame and glory of Commodore Perry and faded into historical obscurity.

North Koreans re-enact the Shinmiyangyo annually and celebrate the defenders as national martyrs and heroes.

For the Koreans, especially, in the Communist North, which now so closely resembles the Hermit Kingdom, the whole experience of 19th Century contact with the Americans is celebrated.  A story was invented making an ancestor of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the People’s Republic of Korea and of the dynasty that has ruled ever since, the local commander who sank the General Sherman.  The American spy ship the USS Pueblo which was captured by the North Koreans in 1968 is now anchored at the site of the destruction of the General Sherman.  And the fallen garrison of Gwangseong are celebrated as martyr/heroes like the Texicans at the Alamo.

Which is why you probably never heard of America’s first Korean War.

 

Other Takes on the Stuff That Dreams are Made of

     

The movie version we all remember and treasure.

More than a decade ago ago, I was getting ready for bed.  It was late.  I was idly flipping through channels while finishing a late-night snack.  Then there it was.  On Turner Classic Movies (TCM)—The Maltese Falcon.  And I caught it only minutes after the opening credits rolled.  I was hooked.  John Huston’s 1941 directorial debut is one of those films you can watch over and over and it is fresh every time.  So, I watched.  Who needs sleep?

Then in the wee small hours, after Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade delivers the classic closing line to Ward Bond’s befuddled detective, “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of,” before I can finally pack it in I discover that next up was the odd Warner Bros. 1936 remake of a still earlier version, Satan Met a Lady.  I had never seen it.  Well, I wanted to see the sun rise anyway.

The Maltese Falcon originated as a serial in the pulp pages of a lurid magazine—The Black Mask.  It was penned by their most noted writer, Dashiell Hammett, a hard drinking former Pinkerton agent who had made a name for himself creating a nameless detective known as The Continental Op.  In the process he was re-inventing the mystery story into something much grittier.  Eventually it would be called the hard-boiled detective genre.  Out with the drawing rooms and genteel murders and in with the gritty streets, betrayal, flawed heroes, and brassy dames.

                                       

                                                        The pulp serial was issued as a novel in 1930.

In 1930 the serial was issued as a stand-alone novel.  It immediately elevated Hammett to the topflight of popular novelists, even though he would be moldering in his gin-soaked grave before it would be acknowledged as an American literary classic.

His character, Sam Spade, was a departure from the faceless operative of a giant corporation.  He was, like Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective.  But unlike Holmes his motives were purely pecuniary, his ethics iffy, and his methods by turns trading in betrayal and brutality.  In an uneasy partnership with Miles Archer, he operates a shady agency in a seedy part of town specializing in divorce, scandal, and perhaps a tad of strong-arm enforcement on the side.  His relationship with the police and authorities is  strained at best, although he has allies—most likely drinking buddies or former associates from an implied past.  Despite his general amorality Spade does have a rough personal and professional code which compels him to solve the murder of a feckless partner who he mistrusted and whose wife he was poking on the side despite any risks or temptations

The character and the lurid story, swirling madly around a McGuffin—in this case a fabulous gold and jeweled statuette known as the Maltese Falcon—were a natural for the new sound movies which could make the most out of tough, snappy dialog which Hammett delivered in, you should pardon the expression, spades.  Warner Bros., which was already distinguishing itself from other studios by its willingness to exploit crime and a little sex, gobbled up the rights.

By the way, there really was a Maltese Falcon, as described in the book and ’41 movie.  There really was an annual tribute of “one falcon” paid by the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V for bestowing the fiefdoms of Malta, Tripoli, and Gozo on them.  Known as the Maltese Tribute it was paid annually to Charles and his heirs for centuries—always as an actual bird, however.  No golden, jewel encrusted bird was ever sent and then lost to antiquity.

Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Danniels  as Sam Spade and Ruth Wonderley in in the 1931 Warner Bros. version.  The pre-code film was racy and a scene where Spade strip searches Wonderley made the Production Code Hayes office block a re-release.

Warners’s first stab at a movie looks like a dud when viewed today.  The camera work, dictated by the cumbersome and noisy Vidaphone process camera which had to be encased in a booth, is static.  The pacing drags.  The acting will win no awards.  Bebe Danniels as the temptress Ruth Wonderly gets top billing.  But the action and most of the dialog revolve around Ricardo Cortez as Spade.  Despite the Latin name, Cortez was a handsome, fast-talking New York Jew who was a hold-over silent leading man.  After early success in talkies, his career faded and he was relegated to playing mostly heavies in B movies.  The ubiquitous Una Merkel enlivened the proceedings as Spades loyal secretary and implied plaything.

Whatever its deficiencies to modern viewers, the film was a hit with audiences.  A few years later when Hammet was even a bigger name and rival MGM began producing the Thin Man movies, Warner’s tried to re-release The Maltese Falcon.  But the Motion Picture Code had come into play since the earlier release.  Code authorities refused to allow the release citing several sexually suggestive sequences—including a strip search of Wonderly by Spade and an acknowledgement of a homosexual relationship between villain Casper Gutman and his youthful stooge Wilmer Cook.

Instead, the studio settled on a remake.  But they felt that they had to even change the title to avoid a preemptive block by the Code Authority.  Thus, Satan Met a Lady was born.

The plot and much of the dialog remain, but the names of all of the characters are changed and the McGuffin this time is the supposedly jewel filled Horn of Roland based on a reference in the Medieval French epic the Song of Roland.  But for those of us steeped in the Bogart classic this is Bizzaro World.  To begin with, it’s a comedy.  Let that sink in.

Bette Davis got top billing but Warren William did most of the heavy lifting in a thinly veiled re-make.  To cash in on the popularity of MGM's Thin Man series, also based on work by Dashiell Hammet, the oddly cast film was played for comedy.

Warner’s reigning queen Bette Davis gets top billing.  But she has remarkably little to do but bat those famous eyes and play the temptress.  She is on screen for less than a quarter of the film.  This was just the kind of throwaway role that had her at constant odds with Jack Warner.  The real star is Warren William as detective Ted Shane. 

William was another Warner’s pre-code leading man.  Tall, handsome, glib and middle aged, he specialized in playing amoral businessmen and bosses in films like Skyscraper Souls, The Match King, and Employees Entrance.  He played the sort of a cad that women adored anyway.  His most memorable turn for modern audiences was as the prudish older brother of Dick Powell in Golddiggers of 1933.  By the time this movie was made he had carved out a reliable niche as the fast talking, close-to-the-line super-lawyer Perry Mason in a series of Warner’s programmers.  By the way, for those who grew up on Raymond Burr’s sort of stuffy and stodgy TV version, William is a revelation.

William’s Shane is basically Mason on steroids.  Glib and without an apparent ethical bone in his body, William plays it to the hilt while wearing, for some unknown reason, a black Stetson cowboy hat instead of a private eye snap-brim fedora.

But what really gives the film a house of mirrors feeling is the casting of supporting characters.  Villain #1, Joel Cairo as played by diminutive Peter Lorre five years later, here is lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher of all people as Anthony Travers.  Villain #2 vividly remembered for the film debut of Sydney Greenstreet as Casper Gutman is here grandmotherly Alison Skipworth as Madame Barabas.  And the teenage gunsel played by Elijah Cook Jr.  here is an over-sized oaf in a beret played by Maynard Holmes.  A very young Marie Wilson doing her best Gracie Allen cum Jean Harlow ditzy blonde is a delight as Miss Murgatroyd, Shane’s semi-loyal secretary.

Lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher took time off from playing butlers to play a heavy, the film's equivalent of Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo three years later.  William sported a black Stetson for reason's never made clear.

Yes, this remake was an odd film.  It makes nobody’s list of classics and Davis considered it the nadir of her career at Warners.  But I have to admit, it was kind of fun.  I bet if I had watched it with the aid of a little pot, like I used to watch late-late movies on my little black-and-white portable TV years ago, I bet it would have been hilarious.

But it won’t make me forget the delicious perfection of watching Bogie tell Mary Astor that he is “sending her over” because he “won’t play sap for you like those other guys did.”