Note: This is #16 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.
The Maltese Falcon strikes me as another one of those classic movies that gets credit for stepping out and doing something for the first time, or at least being remembered most for it. It’s the prototypical example of “film noir” which I think is French for “everybody smokes, yanks their pants up to their arm pits, and talks really fast.” I wasn’t too enthralled with this one, but it was okay.
The plot of The Maltese Falcon is probably the most sophisticated and complicated one I’ve seen yet in this little experiment, but the gist is that private detective Sam Spade gets tangled up in several people’s competing attempts at finding the eponymous falcon, which is actually a small statue of great value. Spade (played by Humphrey Bogart) has to figure out what everyone’s angle is, who to trust, who to trick, and which one of them killed his partner. Things take a LOT of twists and turns, and the whole thing reads very much like the detective story it is.
While leaning towards the melodramatic at times (especially the scenes with the leading lady in them) the acting is pretty good, and Bogart has a certain smarmy charm as Sam Spade. You get the impression that this is a really smart AND tough guy, possessed of several shades of gray in the morality department and more than willing to play people off each other for his own gain. That makes for a refreshing change from all the romatic comedies I’ve been seeing lately. It was also hilarious to see him knock someone unconscious for hours at a time just by gently waving his knuckles in their general direction. The fight scenes, in other words, were pretty underwhelming.
If I have any real complaint about the movie it’s that the plot was difficult to follow, though admittedly that was probably by design. Maybe it’s more rewarding with repeat viewings. At any rate, it’s still worth watching as an early (and still prototypical to this day) example of the gritty detective story in film form. As I watched it I realized that like Citizen Kane, I was more familiar with The Maltese Falcon than I realized just by having seen so much of it in various parodies, tributes, and knock-offs.
Also this week, Paul reviews Grand Illusion (1937).
That’s exactly how I felt when I saw the movie Casablanca for the first time. So many of its lines and scenes and characters were familiar to me, it was a very weird experience to watch the movie.
On the other hand, a complex plot makes a second viewing more enjoyable; you put things together the second time that seemed completely unrelated the first time.
As far as pop-cultural osmosis goes… well, do Jon and Vangelis count as pop culture? ‘Cause they wrote a song celebrating film noir and old movies in general which directly references The Maltese Falcon in several places (“That night, the double-crosser got it right, pretending his was really dim; he slipped to Sam a double gin, Mickey Finn.”)