Ballard Street by Jerry Van Amerongen for August 27, 2010

Hello, my Cleo friends and fellow film fans.

I know there’s some confusion surrounding StelBel’s beautiful poster

in the August 27th  2020 “CLEO and COMPANY” on Sherpa….

and with good reason.

Maybe I can help. I hope.

“The Maltese Basset” is based on a wonderful (IMHO) short novel by Dash-Heel Basset… who only wrote 5 novels in his life…

all gems of dogtective writing…. including his probably most famous… the Thin Dog.

Grog is right… tonight’s poster is from the first film made from the book., in 1931.

It never achieved quite the fame of the 1941 version, with which you may be more familiar…

even though it starred the lovely Bebe Spaniels… and, as a “pre-Code” production, it was quite a bit racier than the later film.

The problem is, it also wasn’t quite as good.. though my review would be much less negative than Grog’s.

The humans thought well enough of it to copy it….

Dennis, I hope you don’t mind that I found this link:

The film was so racy, that it was not allowed to be re-released once the Motion Picture Code was in place….

So a second version, which they recast as a rather unfunny comedy, of all things, was released i9n 1936.

It’s leading lady, later in her now-famous career, wanted nothing to do with it.

So a third version was made, in 1941…

which the humans also copied., with their second bird version… the Maltese Falcon…

And finally, they made the version of “The Maltese Basset” that you saw in Stel’s Tuesday poster….

with human actors and Stel’s lovely basset statuette, in Cleo Clifford’s likeness.

So… we’ve had three basset and four human versions…

and I’ve seen them all!

But I think StelBel wanted to go back to the most original, in making toni