maltese falcon

The black bird came back home to San Francisco on Tuesday, looking like the stuff that dreams are made of.

Actually, it looked even dreamier than that. It looked good enough to get stolen again, which is what always happens to the Maltese Falcon. Getting stolen is the only thing the Maltese Falcon is truly good at.

A replica of the bird, perhaps the most famous movie icon of all time, had long resided in the second-floor display case at John's Grill on Ellis Street, until it was stolen in February. When a $25,000 reward failed to get the bird back, restaurateur John Konstin commissioned the sculptors at the nearby Academy of Art San Francisco to make him a new one.

Tuesday, an art professor and two students brought their model of the bird to the restaurant to show off their work-in-progress and perhaps to let potential thieves size up the age-old target yet again.

Art Professor Peter Schiffrin and students Zach Roberts and Ah Young Jeon spent the better part of a month slapping the thing together from a chunk of clay. It's a lot bigger than the movie falcon, with more detail and fiercer eyes.

"The movie falcon is droopy, saggy and pudgy," Schiffrin said. "This one is more anatomically correct. It's more falcony."

It was unclear exactly how the bird's anatomy had been corrected, as everything about the Maltese Falcon - even the one in the beloved 1941 movie - is a fake. The movie bird, supposedly covered with jewels beneath a coating of black enamel, was a counterfeit made of lead. And Konstin's original fake bird was even faker - no lead, just plaster.

When the model is finished, the new falcon will be made of bronze, weigh 150 pounds and be too heavy for average second-story men, or even for Humphrey Bogart. (The much lighter prop falcon used in the movie accidentally fell on his left foot during filming, seriously injuring Bogey's big toe.)

John's Grill is the legendary home of all things related to the falcon and its detective, Sam Spade, because of a single sentence in the classic Dashiell Hammett crime novel that has Spade dropping by the restaurant for a plate of chops, baked potato and sliced tomatoes. The novel never said what kind of chops they were, but Konstin, taking a literary license, decided they were lamb chops. They're on the menu as the Sam Spade special, along with a price of $26.95, enough in Spade's day to put at least a down payment on a falcon.

When the bronze bird is delivered on Thanksgiving, it will reside in a new, reinforced display case protected by a video camera that will stand guard over the fake falcon 24 hours a day.

"It's a fake of a fake of a fake," acknowledged Konstin, "but people come from all over the world to see it. A lot of people moved to San Francisco because of that movie."

The two art students working on the bird said that they had watched the movie during their sculpting sessions but that neither of them understood the plot, which is even more complicated than correcting a falcon's anatomy.

"Some guy dies in the street," said Jeon.

"The woman murders somebody, and Bogart falls in love," said Roberts. "We weren't watching the movie for the story. We were looking at the bird."