The Maltese Falcon (1931 film) The Maltese Falcon (1931 film) The Maltese Falcon is a 1931 American pre-Code crime film, based on the 1930 novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett and directed by Roy Del Ruth. The film stars Ricardo Cortez as private detective Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as Ruth Wonderly. Maude Fulton, Brown Holmes, and Lucien Hubbard (who went uncredited) wrote the screenplay. The supporting cast features Dudley Digges, Thelma Todd, Walter Long, Una Merkel, and Dwight Frye. A print has been held by the Library of Congress since the 1970s. In San Francisco, private investigator Sam Spade (Ricardo Cortez) and
Maltese language included in both the "Thesaurus Polyglottus" (1603) and "Propugnaculum Europae" (1606) of Hieronymus Megiser, who had visited Malta in 1588–89; Domenico Magri gave the etymologies of some Maltese words in his "Hierolexicon, sive sacrum dictionarium" (1677). An early manuscript dictionary, "Dizionario Italiano e Maltese", was discovered in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome in the 1980s, together with a grammar, the "Regole per la Lingua Maltese", attributed to a French Knight named Thezan. The first systematic lexicon is that of Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius de Soldanis, who also wrote the first systematic grammar of the language and proposed a standard orthography.