The Maltese Falcon 1941 Movie Poster
[amazon-product align="left" alink="#0500ff" bgcolor="#d6d6d6" bordercolor="#e02929" region="us"]6305729328[/amazon-product]
The Maltese Falcon has been assigned a status as the first actual film noir. This labeling is generally agreed upon by a majority of critics and theoreticians who specialize in the classic film noir. However, this classification isn’t entirely accurate, as Stranger on the Third Floor predates The Maltese Falcon by a year. If Stranger on the Third Floor isn’t classic noir, there is no such thing. But the fact remains that The Maltese Falcon is a much more well-known and celebrated film. It lays bare the template for hard-boiled detective fiction on the silver screen so exhaustively that its place is forever stamped with significance and importance in the general history of Hollywood cinema.
As classic noir, its importance resides on multiple levels. This was John Huston’s first film as a director, and he also adapted the screenplay from Dashiell Hammett’s landmark pulp novel of the same name. Huston would go on to become one of Hollywood’s more prolific and well-respected directors; his other films in the noir style included Key Largo (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle. And of course, Huston bridged the gap between classic noir and neo-noir by appearing in Roman Polanski’s modernist masterpiece Chinatown (1974).
Humphrey Bogart in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941)
The Maltese Falcon is also a first of sorts for its star, Humphrey Bogart. This is the first film Bogart appeared in with star billing as a sympathetic hero. The film put him on the map as one of the greatest stars Hollywood would ever know. In fact, beginning with this film, Bogart created the prototypical noir persona: a dispassionate, cynical, and world-weary tough guy with a touch of fatalism and doomed romanticism. This persona transcends the limits of noir as a series, becoming more or less the basic persona associated with Bogart in any film that he appeared in. Bogey appeared in no less than nine classic noirs, and is noted as the archetypal hard-boiled detective as a result of his performance here as Sam Spade, and later as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in Hawks’ The Big Sleep.
The Maltese Falcon also featured a gallery of bit players who would go on to make major contributions to the classic noir style. This gallery included Peter Lorre, the superb Brechtian stage performer, and Elisha Cook, Jr., among the greatest and most prolific of all noir character actors (both Cook and Lorre appeared in Stranger on the Third Floor). Mary Astor, Ward Bond, Barton MacLane, and Sydney Greenstreet in his debut role round out this picture-perfect cast.
Director John Huston
The Maltese Falcon, as directed by Huston, is a fairly classical, sober, and steady-handed film. In 1941, noir had not yet approached its peak of expressionistic experimentation. Instead, this film derives a majority of its noirish effects through its hard-boiled source material (and hard-boiled stance of its characters), its focus on criminal enterprises and detective investigations, its snappy and sarcastic dialogue, and its alluring femme fatale. For the most part, Huston employs even lighting schemes and balanced compositions in this film, where the classic noir typically eschews them altogether. One almost feels he was playing it safe since this was his first attempt at directing. Either way, he created one of the most solidly-constructed and entertaining films ever produced within Hollywood’s classical era.
Like all the best noirs, The Maltese Falcon takes place in the big city; San Francisco, to be specific. The opening images of the film (following the credit sequence, which features the dramatically-lit Maltese Falcon statuette and a narrative crawl) display the urban jungle in the city by the bay. However, unlike most noirs, the city is not seen by night, but rather, by day. Still and all, the classic noir cityscape opening is birthed here, as are many other stylistic elements of the noir series.
Scene: Brigid O'Shaughnessy seeks the help of detective Sam Spade
The hard-boiled detective makes his debut in this film. Also, the hard-boiled detective narrative model is displayed here for the first time as well. A mysterious femme fatale enters the office of Sam Spade and tells him a tale full of lies and deceit while requesting his services to set things right again. Spade doesn’t believe Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the femme fatale, from the start. But he accepts her dangerous quest because he believes in her money, as he tells her later in the film. Spade is not entirely moralistic, but not exactly amoral either. He’s complexity personified. He is first seen alone in his office, casually rolling a cigarette (it should be noted that Hammett’s early jobs included stints as a cigarette roller, and also as a Pinkerton Detective Agency investigator). A moment later, as soon as he gets one glimpse of the dangerous and beautiful femme fatale, he’s never the same again. He’s hooked. This detective mystery opening has become so standardized that it has inherited the status of cliché. To witness it in this film is to witness its origin.
The film also features one of the earliest appearances of the billowing noir curtain, that most versatile and mysterious of noir’s symbols. The noir curtain can be seen when Spade gets an early morning call informing him of his partner’s murder. The fluttering curtain in the background of this odd shot, as Spade takes the call off-screen, seems to comment on his tenuous fate as it so often does — haunting the edges of the frame like a translucent specter. The billowing noir curtain makes another appearance towards the end of the film, when Spade explains to Brigid exactly why he’s sending her over. His fate is inextricably linked to hers. This fact is symbolized not only by the noir curtain, but by the way both characters travel in a downward direction at the film’s conclusion; she by elevator, he by stairs. They are both headed for the same disastrous fate. The only difference is, Brigid will get there a lot sooner.
The Maltese Falcon features one of the all-time great downbeat noir conclusions, which is a virtual tenet of the noir style in general. Spade realizes it’s pointless trying to get the girl, so he sends her into the arms of the police instead. He also realizes it’s pointless to attempt to keep the money he has hustled from the criminal contingent in the film, as well as the glorious statuette that the film is named for. He lets all of these things go, effectively washing his hands of the entire dirty matter he has allowed himself to be entangled in. When he finally delivers one of the greatest closing lines in the history of cinema (“The stuff that dreams are made of”), he does so with a tinge of recognition and despair. Recognition of the fact that life isn’t kind, and we’re all doomed to stumble through it in one way or another, like the uncharted and strange terrain of a dream (or nightmare). This cynical and essential noir sentiment resonated throughout the entire cycle for the next two decades.
Take note of the rapid-fire sarcastic double-talk that permeates the film. Again, it’s a template for the entire noir style. When Spade is told that he always has a smooth explanation for everything, he replies, “What do you want me to do? Learn to stutter??” Mary Astor as a cold-hearted femme fatale introduces that very important and crucial noir characterization into the series. Note also the barred shadows that populate her room, as well as the striped robe she wears in the same scene (in addition to the striped furniture). Not only do the overbearing bars and stripes ensnare Spade in her web of deceit, they also effectively foreshadow her own fate. By the conclusion of the film, bars and shadows bisect Brigid’s face as she’s taken away for a stretch in Tehachapi by the cops.
In that scene in Brigid’s room, Spade says, “Now you are dangerous!”, right after she spins yet another web of lies. He makes this remark with a grim smile. One gets the feeling that Spade, and the classic film noir, is recognizing a proper femme fatale for the first time. That recognition is simultaneously enthralling and appalling. Note the symbol of horses constantly associated with Spade. They appear in pictures on the wall of his apartment, and also in the racing forms on his end table. They appear once again in the form of a statuette on the mantle in the suite of Kasper Gutman, played by Greenstreet, as he attempts to make a crooked deal with Spade. The horse symbol here links Spade with Marlowe in The Big Sleep. In that film, Marlowe speaks of horses and racing in a sexual play on words that he exchanges with Vivian Sternwood Rutledge, played by Lauren Bacall. In The Maltese Falcon horses are never spoken of, only alluded to visually. It’s another animal altogether that becomes the organizing principle of the entire film: the falcon.
Humphrey Bogart grips The Maltese Falcon
The elusive and legendary bird of flight is one of the ultimate MacGuffins, as Hitchcock would say, in the annals of cinema. It is not what it seems, though everyone in the film is struggling to possess it. When it is revealed as a fake by the film’s end, it achieves once again the status of an unattainable dream (as Bogart laments in his famous closing line) after its brief appearance as a tangible and literal embodiment of that dream. Spade himself (though distancing himself from the destructive actions of the falcon hunters) is not able to resist the allure of this dream. This fact is illuminated in the scene where Captain Jacobi (played by the director’s father, Walter Huston) delivers the falcon to Spade with his last dying breath. Caught up in the moment as he cuts into the package, he begins unknowingly and excitedly squeezing his secretary’s arm to the point of causing her considerable pain. This reflex reaction, aimed at the only character in the film he consistently treats with tenderness, is a demonstration of the tempting and dangerous potency that the falcon possesses.
The great closing line of this film is Shakespearean in heritage. That being said, the entire film has a stately (and stagely), classical, and glorious air to it. The Maltese Falcon is a ‘B’ film, deftly masquerading as an ‘A’ production. This sets it in opposition to the gritty darkness that noir would soon come to be characterized by. But the significance of The Maltese Falcon is unquestionable, and not limited to novel stylistic and formal considerations for noir. Quite simply, any serious study of the classic film noir, for historic reasons as much as aesthetic ones, must begin here. For this entire series itself is the stuff that dreams are made of.
[amazon-product align="left" alink="#0500ff" bgcolor="#d6d6d6" bordercolor="#e02929" region="us"]6305729328[/amazon-product]