Are there any significant differences between the novel The Maltese Falcon and the 1941 John Houston movie The Maltese Falcon?

In The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell
Hammett, the murder of Spade's partner Miles Archer is not depicted. In the film version
by John Huston, Archer is shown being shot in Burritt Street but the shooter is not
shown. Huston may have inserted this scene in order to give good actor Jerome Cowan a
little more screen time.

Burritt Street in San Francisco
actually exists. It is a blind alley one block long. There is a plaque on a
building-wall near the entrance stating that this is where Miles Archer was shot by
Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The entrance to the alley is easily observed from the place "where
Bush roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown," but Huston does not show
that

Spade
crossed the sidewalk between iron-walled hatchways that opened above bare ugly stairs,
went to the parapet, and, resting his hands on the damp coping, looked down into
Stockton Street.

The steep
vacant lot between Burritt Street and Stockton Street where Miles Archer would have
tumbled partway down after being shot no longer exists. Huston may have left the scene
out, partly because that particular vacant lot had already been built on by the time he
made the film in 1941.

This scene is important because
Spade can see from his position at the coping overlooking Stockton Street that there is
no way out of the alley except into Bush Street or down the hill through the vacant lot.
Spade learns that the police have established that no one went down the hill into
Stockton because there are no footprints on the wet
ground.

His scrutiny of the scene is what leads him to tell
Brigid in the last chapter and near the end of the
movie:

"Miles
hadn't many brains, but, Christ! he had too many years' experience as a detective to be
caught like that by the man he was shadowing. Up a blind alley with his gun tucked away
on his hip and his overcoat buttoned? Not a chance. He was as dumb as any man ought to
be, but he wasn't quite that dumb. The only ways out of the alley could be watched from
the edge of Bush Street over the tunnel. You'd told us Thursby was a bad actor. He
couldn't have tricked Miles into the alley like that, and he couldn't have driven him
in. He was dumb, but not dumb enough for
that."

The sound of the shot
should have attracted attention in this neighborhood of tall brick apartment buildings
all set close together. But the police did not ask questions of the surrounding tenants
because they took it for granted that Floyd Thursby shot Archer and then, as Lieutenant
Dundy tells Spade (in both the book and the movie):

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Thursby was shot down in front of his hotel just
thirty-five minutes after you left Burritt
Street.

At the end of the
novel Spade accuses Brigid of murdering his partner in the alley with Thursby's
Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver. If Brigid had continued to deny it, Spade would have
turned her over to the police anyway, and they would have found witnesses in the
apartment buildings who had seen a woman going into the alley with Archer and exiting
right after the shot was fired. Someone might have even been able to identify that woman
as Brigid. This would have added to the circumstantial evidence against her, along with
her involvement with Thursby and with the Maltese falcon.