The Maltese Falcon

In light of recent financial scandals, The New York Times today, contains A.O. Scott's review and re-evaluation of one of my favourite films, John Huston's 1941 detective noir masterpiece The Maltese Falcon.

It was the film that cemented Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood star, as the definitive hard-boiled private eye. Also featuring Mary Astor as the femme fatale, Peter Lorre as the effeminate Joel Cairo, and Sydney Greenstreet's film debut as the fat, erudite Englishman Kasper Gutman.

Briefly, the plot concerns a collection of international crooks searching for a jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon. In the centre of the web of deceit and double-crossing, is Bogart's Sam Spade, the San Francisco detective who adheres to his own personal code of honour and is by no means any sort of hero. He is cold and hard and menacing. Nothing about the film is clear-cut, or straightforward. It was Huston's first film, who along with his cinematographer, Arthur Edeson created this beautifully shot work which contains some brilliant set pieces, such as an unbroken seven-minute take wrapped around the rapid flowing dialogue of Greenstreet and Bogart moving from one room into another. Very little of the plot is spelled out, leaving clues hidden in the words and looks of the deceitful characters.

The Maltese Falcon is rightly considered one of the greater movies of all time, and certainly influenced my own movie making attempts. The falcon itself is one of the very few film props I would love to own, indeed MythBusters' Adam Savage detailed the great lengths he went to in a recent TED talk to create an exact replica.

68 years on, The Maltese Falcon is one of the most deeply brooding works about greed, murder, and dark shadows.