The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The Maltese Falcon is of course a classic noir film and as usual with these films, the story itself is secondary - the most important thing is how the characters view what is going on, how they perceive a very complex chain of events, how they are dragged into something, lead into something or are investing themselves. The concrete plot (based on some novel by Dashiell Hammett) is about a private detective who is immersed in the search for a statuette. A dame (Mary Astor!) with some phoney tale is, of course, the reason why he ended up in the mess. In this film, the main character is not the usual anti-hero in the sense that Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade seems to have far more insight into what is going on compared to most of the manically driven noir types. Then again, this movie was made in 1941 and there was barely such a thing as film noir. But Spade is otherwise the sort of weary-looking guy that hundreds of noir films rely on: the tough, sometimes violent, man who talks in muscular idiom.

John Huston focuses on the cravings, the hostility and the lust - and perhaps also a sense of "honor", code of morals: a sense of what one has to do, despite one's personal feelings about it - a very interesting form of conventional morality where the question arises: what does Spade really care about? Obviously, it is not the murdered partner. The Maltese Falcon is thus a violent film, even though it does not show that much explicit violence. There is more an air of violence that never leaves. There is for example a brilliantly filmed conversation between Sam Spade and a shady crook called Gutman. The camera swirls, Gutman offers Spade a drink, they talk, Spade drinks - and passes out. There are many scenes like this, vigorosly built, where tough talk and tough dealings make one thing lead to another, double-crossings and triple-crossings.