unbroken seven-minute take

It's strange but I just don't see an uncut scene like the one described. You'd think it would be easy to spot. Can anyone point to the exact timing that this scene takes place? I wonder if it's a myth.

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I am likewise trying to get to the bottom of this rumor of a supposed seven-minute take. The "last scene", taking place in Spade's apartment and amounting to a little over 27 minutes of screen time, is actually two scenes of roughly equal length; a night sequence and a morning sequence, with the change signaled by a wipe transition and a change in lighting and blocking. There is a total of over 160 cuts in these two scenes and the longest time elapsed between any two cuts is about 1:20. This happens towards the end of the night sequence, during which Gutman hands Spade the envelope of bills and warns the latter to be careful with O'Shaughnessy. It could be argued that this take lasts a total of about 1:50, punctuated only by a two-second close-up of Gutman, but if you're calling that a "continuous take" it's a bit misleading.

I think the rumor of a long take in MF may have started with Meta Wilde via a biography by Lawrence Grobel via a review by Ebert, in which the last gushes:

Consider an astonishing unbroken seven-minute take. Grobel's book The Hustons quotes Meta Wilde, Huston's longtime script supervisor: “It was an incredible camera setup. We rehearsed two days. The camera followed Greenstreet and Bogart from one room into another, then down a long hallway and finally into a living room; there the camera moved up and down in what is referred to as a boom-up and boom-down shot, then panned from left to right and back to Bogart's drunken face; the next pan shot was to Greenstreet's massive stomach from Bogart's point of view. . . . One miss and we had to begin all over again.”
Was the shot just a stunt? Not at all; most viewers don't notice it because they're swept along by its flow. ...

Okay, so I looked for this shot in the sequences that involved Greenstreet's Gutman and Bogart's Spade. Both of their only scenes together (not including the final scenes in Spade's place) take place in a single drawing room in Gutman's hotel. The longest cut is less than one minute and there is nothing of the camera movement described, in fact there is apparently nothing to the set that would allow the possibility of such a sequence: there is a "long hallway" leading to Gutman's room, but the fat man is never seen in it. So, I am left with the improbable and unsatisfying conclusion that unless this scene was entirely mis-remembered by Wilde, whose account would had to have passed through two highly-publicized and well-esteemed authorities without being checked, I am led to believe that there must be a radically different cut of this movie out there somewhere which contains this seven-minute take that Ebert and others have attested (a quick Google search of "maltese falcon" "long take" produces an array of reviews likewise full of praise). Does anyone know?

Incidentally, the longest continuous take by my watch clocks at 1:30 and comprises the entire first scene at Spade's apartment (the two phone calls).

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