Unbeknownst to me when I first scheduled The Maltese Falcon for today, this month is celebrated around the world as Noirvember, an annual celebration of all things noir. Popularized in the 1940s and ’50s, film noir is a genre bursting with recognizable story beats and characters. The superhero genre has capes and costumes and the neverending battle of good versus evil, while a film noir flick might feature a private investigator and a femme fatale stuck in a hardboiled crime narrative that sees them smack-dab in the middle of a murder mystery (or two). While film noir has evolved over the last 80 years to include several subgenres (tech and neo-noir), nothing has stood close to what came out in those first 20 years. Nothing has stood the test of time quite like The Maltese Falcon.
What The Maltese Falcon Means to Us
I came to The Maltese Falcon in a roundabout way. My first awareness of it was in something I’d read as a kid about Star Wars – that Han Solo was inspired by Humphry Bogart as Sam Spade. It wasn’t a jump to wonder if Solo’s ship had a name also inspired by The Maltese Falcon. Other than that, I didn’t really think too much about the film – or film noir in general – until I got into the works of Michael Connelly. Specifically, his novels featuring LA Police Detective Hieronymus Bosch. I remember opining to a friend that in Connelly’s books the city of LA had such a presence that it almost felt like a character. That friend suggested I check out the books of Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, Farewell, My Lovely, and others), as LA featured heavily in those as well. I fell in love with his writing and decided I absolutely had to see at least some of the great film noir, a few of which were based on books by Chandler.
And of course, for my first film, I chose one based on a book by Dashiell Hammett instead of Chandler. Go figure. I’ve seen quite a few film noir since The Maltese Falcon, but it remains my favorite. The look, the razor-sharp dialogue, the iconic characters. Bogart, Astor, Lorre, Greenstreet, and Elisha Cook Jr. Everything about it was just cooler than cool. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it highly – and maybe check out the book (and those by Chandler) as well.
–Bob Cram
As a lover of old movies, I’m embarrassed to admit that the first time I saw The Maltese Falcon was for our list of The 100 Greatest Warner Bros. Movies. It was always on my “I should watch that someday” list, though, so I was excited to have a nudge to finally do it. I suppose my expectations were pretty high, but somehow it still blew me away. Many different adjectives come to mind, but none of them seem to appropriately describe how cool Humphrey Bogart is as Sam Spade. The twists and turns of the story keep you hanging on the edge of your seat, the other actors do their jobs well, and John Huston’s directing is, of course, top-notch. But it’s Bogie that steals every scene and makes this wild ride worth taking over and over again.
–R.J. Mathews
Sam Spade
Humphrey Bogart is sort of the face of the film noir genre, having starred in several of them during the 1940s. However, The Maltese Falcon is what shot him to stardom and it’s not hard to see why. Sam Spade is just one cool cat. It’s funny that Bob mentions how Han Solo was seemingly inspired by Bogart’s Sam Spade since, when I was watching the movie, I was thinking how his performance reminded me of a different Harrison Ford character: Indiana Jones.
Regardless of which Ford character you want to compare Spade to, it’s not hard to see why these comparisons are drawn. Sam oozes confidence. He gets what he wants because he’s not afraid of saying what he wants. He’s also one of the most blunt and straightforward characters I’ve ever seen on film. He doesn’t tiptoe or skirt around anything, he cuts straight to the chase. There were quite a few times while watching that I would guffaw over the stuff that was coming out of his mouth. Hollywood doesn’t make movies with characters like Sam Spade anymore and that’s a goddamn shame because he commands the room like no other.
Quotes, Legacy & The Sequel That Never Was
“When you’re slapped, you’ll take it an like it.”
The Maltese Falcon is also brimming with quotable lines of dialogue, most of them uttered by Bogart as Sam Spade like the one above (my personal favorite). Joel Cairo, played by Peter Lorre, is a low-life crook searching for the jewel-encrusted falcon statuette. His run-ins with Sam are as humorous as they are suspenseful, with Joel always quick to pull a gun out when he sees the tide turning against him.
Although he fits the bill of a villain, The Maltese Falcon doesn’t really have a traditional antagonist, just a trio of characters who are looking out for their own interests above all else. The “Fat Man” is just a cool sort of character that I also feel, like Sam Spade, we don’t see much of on-screen anymore. I mean, when the falcon turns out to be a fake, he just shrugs and asks for his money back and then is on his way out the door. It is Mary Astor as femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy who proves to be the worst of the bunch, with Spade figuring out that she is the one behind the deaths of his partner Miles Archer.
The success of The Maltese Falcon initially led to Warner Bros. quickly greenlighting a sequel that was tentatively titled The Further Adventures of the Maltese Falcon (yes, that is quite the mouthful). Thankfully, director John Huston and Bogart’s busy schedules prevented a sequel from materializing. The Maltese Falcon does not need a follow-up. Sure, you could do an adventure movie that actually hunts down the real falcon everyone is after, but it’d be hard to do a sequel in the film noir genre that brings back Sam Spade and is still about the falcon. So instead, we’re left with an Academy Award-nominated movie that was one of the first 25 movies selected by the Library of Congress to be included in the National Film Registry. If that doesn’t make The Maltese Falcon an essential watch, I don’t know what would.
Are you a fan of The Maltese Falcon? Do you have a fun fact, piece of trivia, or analysis about the film? Please share it in the comments!