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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.