Over dimensioned as it might be (there are a least half a dozen Warner detective films better than this), The Maltese Falcon is a film worth celebrating for a number of reasons. It introduces Bogart as a lead, and it is from Sam Spade than he will build his own screen myth; regardless of which side of the law he's standing, Bogey will always play Bogey. The film is from 1941, a very important landmark year in the American industry. It is through pictures like this one, Citizen Kane or High Sierra that American cinema started a new era where storytelling turns more novelesque, fragmentary and obscure. The setting is almost exclusively urban, the tone inevitably pessimistic. The characters' moral contradictions are expressed through multiple points of view, all deceiving and incomplete: it is in the spectator's mind that films will eventually make sense. The Maltese Falcon is also exemplary of the use of a fabulous McGuffin (the falcon itself) as a plot artifice, an excuse, a mean to order or justify a psychological character study otherwise loosen and disembodied. And last but not least this film introduces the wonderful Sidney Greenstreet & Peter Lorre association in crime, a sort of memorable Laurel and Hardy of the Olympus of Noir.
Review of The Maltese Falcon
