So last week I had to read The Maltese Falcon for my Hard-Boiled Fiction And Film Noir class, and today I had to watch the film. I had heard the film was basically identical to the book, so I was excited.
The novel by Dashiell Hammett was one of the early hard-boiled detective novels of the 1930s. It started a massive trend (still going on today) of giving a rough, go-getter detective some insane mystery to solve. He often ignores the laws of the police force, and doesn’t take shit from anyone. In this case, his name was Sam Spade, played by the wonderful Humphrey Bogart.
So the film opens with this intro:
And I was immediately like:
I spent the first about… 130 pages of a 215 page novel having no clue what the Maltese Falcon was and how it came about… and in the movie they tell you straight up! But oh well, I was over it, because even if they hadn’t told the audience I would have already known. So I sat back and enjoyed this amazing film.
The main plot follows Spade as he tries to figure out more and more about a woman named Brigid O'Shaugnessy. She originally came to him as Miss Wonderly and then later told him her real name was Miss DeBlanc, but then finally settled on her “actual” name about 30 minutes into the film. And she’s very messed up.
She’s a pathological liar and good one at that. She keeps the truth from Spade for almost the entire movie, until finally he figures it out and gets to the bottom of the actual case, which involves a man named Gutman and his desperate attempts at obtaining the Maltese Falcon from Brigid.
One thing I found odd about both the film and book is that they throw in this very off-putting character of Joel Cairo. And by off-putting I mean the most bizarre, metrosexual/homosexual man I’ve seen in any film from this era. Here he is.
And by no questions he’s referring to his sexuality… okay kidding. But he’s just weird. In the book, he physically comforts a young man who has just been beaten up by Spade, and in the movie he does it even more awkwardly. Also there’s a creepy undertone about him being foreign and slightly (totally) homosexual at the same time. It was creepy and I don’t know why it was necessary.
Homoerotic undertones. Just saying.
Aside from that, the film was actually really entertaining. The mystery aspect of it was well done, because the plot is like… The DaVinci Code-level complex… but entertaining and thoughtful.
Also, when I was doing some research for this post I came across the weirdest discovery. The director of the film, John Huston, is Anjelica Huston’s father.
That’s not the weird part. When I saw his IMDb picture, I recognized him, but I wasn’t sure what from. I tried to forget it… but then:
John Huston plays Noah Cross in Chinatown! Granted that was 33 years after he directed The Maltese Falcon. Okay… if you haven’t seen Chinatown, just understand that his character in this film is the stuff of nightmares.
Unfortunately (but also fortunately) gifs of this man do not exist.
Okay, overall, I loved the movie. But I think a big part of that came from having just read the book a few days ago. It ranks at #122 on the IMDb Top 250, which I can agree with. It had its slow parts, but from a film standpoint it was engrossing, intellectual, and humorous when it needed to be.
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