The Gay Falcon

The Gay Falcon (1941)

CRIMINALS BEWARE! Here comes fiction's man of mystery!

Having forsaken the detective business for the safer confines of personal insurance, Gay Laurence is compelled to return to his sleuthing ways. Along with sidekick, Jonathan 'Goldy' Locke, he agrees to look into a series of home party robberies that have victimized socialite Maxine Wood. The duo gets more than they bargained for when a murder is committed at Wood's home, but Lawrence still finds time to romance the damsel.

Date of release
1941-10-24
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (26)
Runtime
1h 7m
Genres
Mystery
Director
Irving Reis
Collection
The Falcon Series

Casting

Interesting facts

The Gay Falcon is a 1941 American mystery thriller film directed by Irving Reis and starring George Sanders, Wendy Barrie and Allen Jenkins. A B film produced and distributed by RKO Pictures, it the first in a series of sixteen films about a suave detective nicknamed The Falcon. Intended to replace the earlier The Saint detective series, the first film took its title from the lead character, Gay Laurence. Sanders was cast in the title role; he had played Simon Templar/The Saint in the prior RKO series. He was teamed again with Wendy Barrie who had been with him in three previous Saint films.

Production

The Gay Falcon was intended by RKO Radio Pictures to introduce a replacement for The Saint series after RKO decided to sever ties with Leslie Charteris, the creator of The Saint who disapproved of the way the studio had been adapting his stories, especially with how George Sanders was playing the title character Simon Templar/The Saint. Renewing the film rights to the latter character would also be too expensive.

In March 1941, the studio bought the rights to Michael Arlen's story "The Gay Falcon", saying they intended Sanders and Wendy Barrie to star. They assigned Lynn Root and Frank Fenton to work on the script, resulting in Charteris suing RKO on the grounds that "the Falcon was the Saint in disguise." Filming started May 1941. At one stage RKO considered calling the film Meet the Falcon before reverting to The Gay Falcon.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended