AFI #31: The Maltese Falcon (1941)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on November 27, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and I can't stop now until I finish.

(PG) ★★★★

Director: John Huston.

Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Lee Patrick, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr., Barton MacLane, Ward Bond, Jerome Cowan, Gladys George.

"I'm tellin' ya, it's chocolate. With a nougat centre."

When I wrote my first crime novel, my far-more-experienced co-writer sent me a list of tips and tricks to help me find my feet in this new world of murder and mayhem. The list included this incredible piece of advice:

"Use oblique dialogue. Try to generate conflict at all times in your writing. Attempt the following experiment at home or work: spend the day refusing to answer your family and colleagues’ questions directly. Did you generate conflict? I bet you did. Apply that principle to your writing and your characters will respond likewise."

Please don't try that at home or work.

Perhaps the greatest example of this infuriating principle is The Maltese Falcon, the novel by Dashiell Hammett and adapted here by John Huston. Part of the intrigue that drags you through the film is that the characters rarely speak the truth, and when they do, it's impossible to be sure if they really are. The story is a mess of low morals fuelled by greed, and only a similarly low-moral detective will be able to unpick the fact from the fiction. 

And thus, film noir was born. 

Mind you, as discussed in my review of Double Indemnity, the origins of film noir are harder to pin down than a snitch in a crowded speakeasy. But it's universally agreed that The Maltese Falcon played a significant part in defining the genre. 

There had been film detectives before - Hammett's novel had already been adapted for the screen twice previously. But Sam Spade, as portrayed by Bogart under the watchful eye of first-time director Huston, was cut from a different cloth. He is what would become the quintessential noir private eye - a real hat-and-trenchcoat detective who keeps a bottle by the bed, is constantly rolling cigarettes, and isn't afraid to clock someone or tell the cops to take a hike.

The Maltese Falcon hasn't aged as well as other noirs, such as Double Indemnity or Sunset Boulevard, but both those films owe Huston's debut a debt. His film does a lot to help set the beats, tone and formula for film noir. Huston's script lifts Hammett's dialogue straight from the page to achieve this, but he's also not afraid to let the film mess around in the Hayes Code-approved muck of morality.  

As Barry Norman put it in his 100 Best Films Of The Century, The Maltese Falcon "is in many ways a significant movie, but if it were that alone it would by now be merely a footnote in books of cinematic history". 

"That it has avoided such a fate is due to the fact that it's also marvellous entertainment, beautifully played and most skilfully crafted," wrote Norman.

It certainly is entertaining, moving at a ferocious clip out of the blocks. Within the first 17 minutes, we get two murders, an affair and the first of many double crosses. After that, it twists and turns through about 20 more double crosses as everyone lies their pants off in an effort to get hold of the titular MacGuffin.

One of the film's great strength is its script. Huston had 10 co-written screenplays under his belt before The Maltese Falcon, but this was his first solo outing behind both the typewriter and the camera. Kim Newman, writing for 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, noted that Citizen Kane came out the same year, but that The Maltese Falcon announced "the arrival not of an enfant terrible but of a consummate professional". 

Indeed, as a film noir, visually the film is "sparing in its use of symbolic shadows", as Newman put it, and it adheres to the afore-mentioned obliqueness of Hammett's dialogue, but it's writing is impressively sharp. Just look at how we're introduced to Spade through his relationship with short-lived detective agency partner Archer (Cowan). We learn Spade has no problem sleeping with Archer's wife and struggles to eulogise him, yet feels it's his absolute duty to defend Archer's honour and solve the mystery of his death. Everything we need to know about Spade is shown through the lens of this relationship - that's some great writing.

The film's only major let-downs also come through the script sadly. The love/lust friction between Spade and proto-femme fatale O'Shaughnessy (Astor) is utterly unconvincing, partly because of the mass lie fest, yet by film's end we're supposed to believe it was the real deal. Similarly, the "everyone's lying" motif grinds occasionally as it spirals into absurdity. Spade's first chat with the villainous Gutman (Greenstreet) is utterly ridiculous, with both characters playing an infuriating game of verbal chess with each other that tests the audience's limits. It's both the boon and bane of the film.

But more often than not, the fast-talkin' double-talkin' sings in the mouths of its cast. Bogart's performance is a star-maker. He's the right mix of wit and menace, of callous and caring, of careful and carefree, creating an intelligent tough guy with borderline morals that has echoed down through the ages, to James Bond, Han Solo, Dirty Harry and more. Barry Norman called him "the prototypical antihero, a cynical romantic as tough, mercenary and ruthless as any of the crooks who oppose him".

Astor is marvellous as a woman trying to act tough yet fragile at the same time, but it's the duo of Greenstreet and Lorre that steal the show. Greenstreet, in his screen debut, earnt a worthy Oscar nomination, doling out mountains of exposition as if it was chocolate ice-cream. Lorre, who had already given one of the greatest film performances in the history of cinema in Fritz Lang's M, demonstrated his ability, as Huston put it, to be "doing two things at the same time, thinking one thing and saying something else". Relegated to "memorable sideman" despite his incredible abilities, Lorre's career was effectively saved from B-movie hell by Huston.

It's rude to read over someone's shoulder.

(Sidenote: the casting in The Maltese Falcon inadvertently created a "stock company" out of Bogart, Lorre, and Greenstreet, who added Claude Rains to their troupe for Casablanca and Passage To Marseilles. Lorre and Greenstreet paired 10 times in total, Lorre and Bogart five times.)

Huston's sharp script (from excellent source material), his workmanlike direction (with some artful long takes and noir flourishes), and a top-notch cast of mostly B-graders set The Maltese Falcon above anything vaguely similar from the time, while helping create something new in the process. As "a cornerstone of film noir" (Newman), "the first of the great private-eye films" (William Bayer), and "one of the most influential noirs" (Rotten Tomatoes consensus), its place in history is assured. But it happens to be a cracking good murder-mystery at the same time.