The Maltese Falcon
John Huston (1941)
The history of the eponymous bird, summarised in on-screen text at the start, is immediately intriguing[1]. John Huston draws you into the plot briskly and effectively. This is an early noir (photographed by Arthur Edeson): the visual qualities that would become genre mannerisms still feel fresh. The Maltese Falcon was Huston’s directing debut – as such, it’s a remarkably confident piece of work. It regularly crops up on great movies lists and it left me cold.
This was the third screen version of Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, though the second one, in 1936, had a different name (Satan Was a Lady) and purported to be a comedy (the star, Bette Davis, later described it as ‘junk’). As both director and screenplay writer, Huston shows himself a good storyteller although this is a notably talky film. Hardboiled the dialogue may be but there’s a surfeit of it – much of it allocated to the sinister Kasper Gutman (aka ‘the Fat Man’), long obsessed with tracking down and owning the falcon statuette. Gutman is played by the highly distinctive, seriously limited Sydney Greenstreet. He’s one half of a famous double act with Peter Lorre, as the fey and febrile Joel Cairo. I often liked Lorre but he seems cast here just to do a super-nervy turn. I preferred, to either him or Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr, as Gutman’s factotum, Wilmer Cook. (The characters do have good names.)
As the private-eye protagonist Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart is excellent when Spade is laconic and sarcastic but lacks variety whenever he’s impassioned. People on the screen keep describing Spade as ‘wild and unpredictable’. If only. Mary Astor is the femme fatale, Brigid O’Shaughnessy. She’s very beautiful but the character’s repeated excuses for why she’s lied to Spade become tedious. The two other significant women in the story are Spade’s devoted secretary and the widow of his partner in the private investigation business. The playing of these roles, by Gladys George and Lee Patrick respectively, struck me as borderline laughable. Gutman’s increasingly manic unwrapping of the package containing the avian Holy Grail is a suspenseful moment. The bird’s eventual appearance is a bit of an anti-climax even before it’s revealed to be a lead fake.
27 September 2021
[1] ‘In 1539 the Knight Templars [sic] of Malta, paid tribute to Charles V of Spain, by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from break to claw with rarest jewels – but pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day … ‘