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Review

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The stuff that dreams are made of

The Maltese Falcon is certainly not the quintessential film noir from a cinematographic perspective, but from a narrative and thematic point, it’s about as complete an entry point as you’re going to find. Hard-boiled detectives existed before Humphrey Bogart brought Sam Spade to life, but Bogart’s turn in The Maltese Falcon crystallized the character type into a template that movies would emulate but never match for the next 15 years; or, really, the next 85 years and counting. The film remains an icon of Hollywood; the AFI picked it as the 31st greatest American movie ever made in 2004. And while I might not go quite so high in my evaluation, the fact remains that The Maltese Falcon is the enduring and delectable essence of film noir cynicism.

Adapted faithfully from Dashiell Hammett’s novel, the story opens like every good film noir: a dame walks into a private eye’s office with a case. Ruth Wonderly (Mary Astor) wants to hire Spade and his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) to find her sister, who is planning to elope with a man named Floyd Thursby. Spade and Archer, much like the audience, instinctively know that there is more than meets the eye to this case; though maybe it’s partly because of this movie that we know so.

(Actually, the movie really opens with a title card explaining what the Maltese Falcon actually is; a priceless treasure and historical artifact. I’m ambivalent on this title card; it certainly sets us up to know that there’s a conspiracy afoot and that it swirls around the physical essence of wealth and power. And yet I’d say that’s pretty unnecessary; we gather as such by the film’s mid-point, and by the climax we’ve had the falcon’s history re-iterated to us in the screenplay.)

Flash forward a few hours and everything has gone haywire: Thursby is dead, as is Spade’s partner Archer. (In one of the darkest running jokes in movie history, Spade is so unconcerned about his longtime partner’s death that his first instinct is to get his windows changed to remove Archer’s name from the business front.) Spade starts digging, and what emerges is a three-way scramble between nefarious actors to get their hands on a priceless piece of history. The first player is the dame, Ms. Wonderly who reveals her real identity to be Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Second is the greedy little creep Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), who is so heavily coded as a limp-wristed gay man that “coded” doesn’t even seem the right word. Third is the fat cat globalist financier Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), willing to throw money around to get what he wants on the presumption it will lead to more money. Before long, Spade has thrown himself in the mix; to whose benefit, he won’t say — or, rather, he will, and either be lying or change his mind a scene later.

John Huston directs in one of the all-time great directorial debuts. Huston meticulously planned the project for months prior to production to allow for cheaper and faster shooting, and that preparation pays off: Huston constructs every scene perfectly, with some of the most psychologically effective pulls and pans and camera angles you’ll see in a classic Hollywood film. It makes a movie whose scenes are essentially all talking in rooms feel more cinematic and dangerous. Huston’s style never fully unshackles into expressionism or arch decadence, but it’s a really terrific piece of filmmaking. Later film noir would lean into chiarascuro lighting and pitch-black composition that more starkly reflects the moral core (or lack thereof) of these kinds of stories, and that’s really the biggest disappointment in The Maltese Falcon. It looks good but not especially jaw-dropping.

But it’s hard to complain when everything here works so well, especially the acting. You could say whatever you want about Bogart’s performance as Spade and it wouldn’t be enough; it’s one of the sterling standards of movie history. He absolutely nails the demeanor of the suave but slippery detective, tough and wily and complicated. He’s the epitome of suave confidence, but he never fully sheds the character’s sleaze, which is an important part of the film and character, too.

Lorre and Greenstreet are outstanding as two forces straddling for the falcon. Lorre leverages his odd screen presence and unique voice to always flip the energy of a scene upside down. He’s almost sympathetic in the way he carries his conniving goon with gentleness. Greenstreet, meanwhile, has maybe the toughest role in the film given how much exposition he has to dump on the audience, but his haughty, salivating delivery keeps every word captivating. The pair share a fair number of scenes, which is always fun, both because they’re great and because they’re so contrasting in statures and demeanors. I would watch a buddy comedy of these two.

Mary Astor presents an intriguing case, though. You may notice I haven’t labeled her as a “femme fatale” thus far. From a screenplay perspective, she absolutely fits the bill of that famous noir character type. And yet Astor doesn’t really feel like a femme fatale to me. It’s an impressive performance by Astor, technically, as she does a great job shifting her character as she manipulates Spade across the runtime. And yet I never buy that she is the kind of woman who throws men’s lives out of whack. It’s easy to imagine someone else bringing a new level of sexual charge and chemistry to the role, someone like a Veronica Lake or, heck, Ingrid Bergman. I wonder if Bergman and Bogart could ever have chemistry?

(Speaking of Casablanca, which came out a year later and transplanted Bogart, Lorre, and Greenstreet from this cast, it has more of the visual identity I associate with noirs than this, perhaps the most famous film noir. And yet I’ve never heard anyone call Casablanca a ‘film noir,’ and wouldn’t dare to do so myself. The doomed romanticism trumps the ravishing visual profile there; the hardboiled bitterness trumps the more buttoned down look here.)

From a thematic perspective, The Maltese Falcon is about as perfect as any hard-boiled detective story or film noir could hope to be. You have in Spade a detective of someone who operates outside the law — not for it or against it. He’s driven by a desire to be the dominant “dick” in both relevant senses of the word. He seduces every woman he crosses paths with, maybe even falls in love with them, though, for him that’s indistinguishable from “seducing.” Many of the mysteries he unwinds can be read as elaborate cat-and-mouse seduction stories.

When the story is firing smoothly, which is most of the runtime, the three other prongs of the mystery — O’Shaughnessy, Cairo, and Gutman — provide faces for various moral vices to audiences escaping a depression and on the verge of another culture-reshaping war: sex, foreign treachery, and greedy capitalism. Like German expressionism, the story and cultural tides amplify each other, a dark knotty mystery the reflection of a dark knotty world.

The only really sympathetic character is Spade’s secretary Effie, played wonderfully by Lee Patrick, who is always willing to clean up a mess or solve a problem on a moment’s notice. Even she, though, seems to relish almost fetishistically the thrill of operating in the underworld.

The film’s ending is a mix of outright iconic perfection — featuring one of the great closing lines in cinema history that puts a perfect bow on the futility of the film’s entire struggle — and some glaring pacing problems. When the whole crew finally gets together in a room, the tension defuses rather than boils. They spend several minutes debating the logistics of a cover-up of the two murders that opened the film, murders that the audience is barely thinking about at this point. And it’s moot because that cover-up will be undone and reconfigured in the film’s closing few lines, anyways. The denouement also asks us to consider (then reject) a romanticism in Spade towards O’Shaughnessy that it simply hadn’t showcased before then; though, again, my issues might lie more in Astor’s casting and chemistry with Bogart than anything else.

The sum of it all is one of the truly great film noirs, a muscular and brutal little feature despite being almost entirely free of action after the first few minutes. I’m right on the fence of calling it an all-time capital-M masterpiece. I have just enough hang-ups and what-ifs to refrain from doing so, but I still give it the highest recommendation.

Is It Good?

Exceptionally Good (7/8)

Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.

7 replies on “The Maltese Falcon (1941)”

Shout out to Nate, who loves this film and once, more than a year ago, asked me to write a review of it.

“I’ve never heard anyone call Casablanca a noir”

Maybe even surprisingly, since the label gets thrown around so willy-nilly, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (I possibly like noirs that aren’t “real” noirs better a lot of the time). As far as the photographic style goes, semi-expressionist lighting set-ups are all over the place in the period, and you have movies like The Third Man and Moontide (possibly a noir by acclimation and not a “real” one itself) pushing it towards what one thinks of as “noir,” though the latter, which is very lushly romantic in addition to being about murder and poverty, made me realize how extremely thin the line between evil high-contrast photography and erotic high-contrast photography (or tragic high-contrast photography) could be in black-and-white.

(As for Maltese Falcon, swell movie indeed. I should give it another spin, it’s been about ten years.)

It’s an interesting point that the term is so aggressively applied that it doesn’t hold a lot of meaning on its own. My understanding of the term is that it’s less of a genre than a series of traits both thematic and visual. But that’s just in my own head, and I haven’t seen nearly enough ’40s films to have developed a more comprehensive taxonomy.

Just butting in to say you’re completely right that it’s less of a genre than a series of traits. You may know this already, but it was never actually considered a ‘genre’ in the moment; filmmakers in the 40s weren’t intentionally making film noirs. They were just making dramas/thrillers/what-have-you that reflected the mood and attitudes of the time. It was French critics who retroactively applied the term after noticing that a lot of the big movies from that era (including Maltese) had similar styles and themes that made them worth grouping together, and then it went from there.

Oh hell yeah.

In addition to everything you mentioned, I love how nearly every scene in this is a power struggle, and the dynamics keep shifting around, so someone who seemed to hold all the cards moments ago might suddenly realize that he’s in over his head, or that someone else knows more than he does, or that he’s being poisoned by that jolly big guy. Gutman is a pantheon supporting character for me; Sydney Greenstreet should have been in every movie.

I get the idea that the final sequence has pacing issues, but it’s all worth it to me for the ultimate confrontation between Spade & Brigid. For as cold and calculating as Spade is, he actually makes himself pretty vulnerable, emotionally and physically, on numerous occasions in the story. He opens himself up to Brigid, he gives Cairo his gun back in his office, he walks into Gutman’s poisoning trap, etc. So when he finally decides that he’s not going to let himself be taken advantage of, that he’s not going to ‘play the sap’ for Brigid or anyone else, it feels like the declaration of an all-encompassing ethos that we know will guide him for the rest of his life. In Bogart’s hands, there’s such a brutal intensity and urgency to it, as if he knows that if he doesn’t get a grip on this at that very moment, it’ll hold him back forever.

And the dialogue! It’s all I can do to not list all my favorite quotes, but all those noir novelists (Hammett, Chandler, Cain) had a way of speaking and thinking that was stylish yet un-pretentious, cool without being forced, hard-edged but tinged with vulnerability. Movie dialogue just isn’t like this anymore.

Great call on the dialogue. It’s ear candy. I also like your read on Spade’s moments of vulnerability. Great stuff.

Ranking a personal pantheon of supporting characters would be an interesting list idea. It would probably end up more interesting than a respective of protagonists or villains, honestly.

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