The Maltese Falcon is a noir detective movie, directed by John Huston in 1941 and starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor – it is the fourth movie that I covered this year which reached its 85th anniversary (1941 was apparently a good year). It is based on the homonymous novel written by Dashiell Hammett, a hundred page or so booklet which I will admit has its charm. Hammett also worked on other short stories featuring the same private eye as the main character, but never lengthier works.
The movie follows one of the cases that stumbles on the doorstep of Samuel Spade; the falcon implied in the title and that is at the center of the whole kerfuffle is a treasure that the knights of the Order of Saint John of Malta paid as tribute to the monarchs of Sicily. In reality the falcon was not a treasure but rather a real life bird and the tribute was more symbolic in nature, a sign of fealty. Hammett gave some nuance to this account in order to set in motion the plot and have the shady characters he invented crave for said treasure.
In my opinion Humphrey Bogart played some of the most iconic private investigator roles of all time (think about Raymond Chandler’s adapted works for instance) and he had a unique knack for it. The way he acts, the way he moves, his micro-expressions and characterizations always feel on point. With the character of Sam Spade he becomes a master at diffusing any escalating situation, either through stares or astute quips. He knows a lot about people and how they behave; as such, he always knows how to interact with them. In various scenes, we get an authentic feeling for who and what Sam Spade is. The term ‘round’ character fails to encompass all of the minute nuances and details that the movie portrays.
This brief description of Sam Spade got me back to thinking of just how much work was put into making a good movie back then. The script and the acting were big selling points, not the big budget and special effects. Plot nodes, delivered through various devices such as newspaper close-ups, dialogue and even narration (considering the first two minutes of the movie) constructed a complete story and things were never done superficially.
Even secondary actors, such as Peter Lorre for instance (who during those years had a prolific career) do not feel like mere caricatures of themselves. It may be argued that Lorre himself was a bit of a typecast, always portraying that ‘eerie’ or ‘shady’ character, but he did so to perfection. I mean, the guy played the leading role in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) after all.
I would give this movie an 8 out of 10 ‘too slick for his own good’.