**** (out of ****)
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook, Jr.
Directed & written for the screen by John Huston, from the novel by Dashiell Hammett
1941
101 min NR (should be PG)
“His yes meant yes, his no meant no.”
—Katherine Hepburn, on Humphrey Bogart.
“I just watched ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ and Bogart is a such an asshole.”
—a friend of mine, in praise of “The Maltese Falcon.”
He’s lived through a Depression. He’s good at his job and knows it. He has no patience for bunglers or needless chit-chat. One of his lines in Dashiell Hammett’s novel is “making speeches is no damned good.” He’d never brag about how tough he obviously is. He’s scarred, middle-aged, knows how to wear a fedora, and sucks down cigarettes without affectation. He takes shit from no one.
He’s Bogart’s private eye Sam Spade, and his greatest wisdom in a violent and changing world is self-knowledge. If he can control nothing else, he will control and know who he is. This gives him an ironic detachment, an edge, which he shares with “The Maltese Falcon’s” heavy heavy (a very polished Sydney Greenstreet). In their remorseless and occasionally blood competition for the maguffin of the title, they spin labyrinthine, cumulonimbus lies for each other. Each only half believes the other, but each is so impressed with the other’s skill at lying that they don’t want it to end. They both play the game so well.
My favorite scene in “The Maltese Falcon,” perhaps barring the final confrontation, involves Spade yelling it out with the district attorney. Taking a moment from the fireball of words that they’ve been hurling at each other, Spade briefly turns his indignation on the court stenographer and spits “are you getting all this, or do you need me to go slower?” When the stenographer replies that he’s getting every word just fine, Spade pauses in his wrath to sincerely compliment the young man: “good job, son.” Conversely, the only villains who really bug Spade are the sloppy ones. He’s disgusted with how easily he outsmarts Peter Lorre’s limp-wristed dandy, and he’s even more disgusted by the patently insecure tough guy act put on by Greenstreet’s heavily-armed thug (Elisha Cook, Jr.).
It’s his appreciation of the game well-played that gets Spade dragged into the whole mess in the first place. He and his partner don’t believe the sob story brought to them by The Girl (Mary Astor). Some kind of baloney about a sister having man trouble, or blackmail, or something. But she lies so well, so professionally. They know she’s bad news but, like Robert Mitchum in “Out of the Past” or Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity,” they cannot resist. Then the partner gets capped and Spade is up to his eyes in crooks, lowlifes, and suspicious cops in a bloody quest of bluffs, lies, and shifting loyalties, all in pursuit of a priceless crusader artifact.
If you watch “The Maltese Falcon” and the Bogart-Bacall “The Big Sleep” around the same time, mixing them up is inevitable. Bogart’s detectives in both movie have a fascination with lying. In “The Big Sleep,” he has a great scene in which he keeps telling a young liar “not likely, but we’ll let it slide.” Again and again, for a detective in search of the truth, he’s awfully willing to temporarily discount veracity for the sake of his ironic appreciation for a game well played. If he ever faced a hangman, Spade would pause to appreciate the workmanship of the noose (if it were so deserving). Smell the roses while you can, wherever you can.
The downside of Spade’s inflexible self-knowledge is the rigid, hard-faced morality that goes with it. It is this morality—this code—that guides him to catch the killer of the partner he was cuckolding, no matter what his personal feelings on the matter might be. This leads to the film’s famous climax, which I won’t discuss in case you haven’t seen it. Needless to say, society may collapse and the world may crumble, but he will keep order in his corner of it, and what a hollow victory it is. Or, said another way—in the spirit of the disillusionment and fatalism that everyone was trying to repress during the Depression and the war—everything sucks so bad that even doing the right thing still sucks.
In his article “Notes on Film Noir,” director-screenwriter Paul Shrader points out that a proto-noir like “The Maltese Falcon” does not quite achieve the dizzying doom-and-gloom of true film noir cynicism, like “Out of the Past.” (Quoth Greer Garson and Robert Mitchum: “Do you know a way to win?” “I know a way to lose slower.” I’ll never get tired of quoting that.) Shrader attributes “Falcon’s” relative politeness to “the need to produce Allied propaganda abroad and promote patriotism at home” in the ‘40s and the need for Depression era movies to “keep people’s spirits up” in the ‘30s. For a quick idea of just how incongruously cheerful the films of the Depression were compared to the Depression itself, check out Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”
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