Out In The Film Noir Night- Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon  

 

Films In Brief

The Maltese Falcon, written Dashiell Hammett, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet 

In literature and film there have been no lack of private detective-types depicted from the urbane Nick Charles (also a Hammett creation) to Mickey Spillane’s rough and tumble Mike Hammer but the classic model for all modern ones is Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade (the Humphrey Bogart role in the film) in The Maltese Falcon. Some may argue Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe and may have a point but as for film adaptation Spade wins hands down. Compare, if you will, Bogart’s performance in The Maltese Falcon with The Big Sleep. Get my point. But enough of that. What make’s Spade the classic is his intrepidness, his orneriness, his dauntless dedication to the task at hand, his sense of irony, his incorruptibility, his willingness to take an inordinate amount of bumps and bruises for paltry fees and his off-hand manner with the ladies and a gun. And in The Maltese Falcon he needs all of these qualities and then some.

And for what? It is the bird, stupid. You know the stuff that dreams are made of. This modern tale of greed and desire gets nicely worked with a cast of adventurers, including Sam’s love interest, who are serious, inept, and ultimately dangerous. There is a certain amount of off-hand humor as is warranted by some of the situations thrown in to boot. Sam is well up to handling everything thrown at him by his male adversaries. But, the dame (played by Mary Astor in the film), that is a different question. She is as greedy (if not more so) than the rest but she is ready to use her feminine wiles on even the incorruptible Spade in order to get that damn bird. That, dear friends, puts her beyond the pale and she will have many a lonely night in prison to think through the error of her ways. In the end Sam’s honor and the honor of his profession is intact, and that’s what counts.