 A gallery of high-living lowlifes will stop at nothing to get their sweaty hands on a jewel-encrusted falcon. Detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) wants to find out why - and who'll take the fall for his pertner's murder. An all-star cast (including Sydney Greenstreet, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr.) joins Bogart in this crackling mystery masterwork written for the screen (from Dashiell Hammett's novel) and directed by John Huston. This nominee for 3 Academy Awards Best Picture, Supporting Actor (Greenstreet) and Screenplay (Huston) - catapulted Bogart to stardom and launched Huston's directorial career. All with a bird and a bang! Storyline: Spade and Archer is the name of a San Francisco detective agency. That's for Sam Spade and Miles Archer. The two men are partners, but Sam doesn't like Miles much. A knockout, who goes by the name of Miss Wanderly, walks into their office; and by that night everything's changed. Miles is dead. And so is a man named Floyd Thursby. It seems Miss Wanderly is surrounded by dangerous men. There's Joel Cairo, who uses gardenia-scented calling cards. There's Kasper Gutman, with his enormous girth and feigned civility. Her only hope of protection comes from Sam, who is suspected by the police of one or the other murder. More murders are yet to come, and it will all be because of these dangerous men -- and their lust for a statuette of a bird: the Maltese Falcon. Written by J. Spurlin Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, September 28, 2010 -- If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Hollywood took that adage to heart, if perhaps not for purely honorable reasons, as it attempted to adapt Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon for the screen. A 1931 version was rather faithful to Hammett's vision, if a bit faster and looser than Hammett's typically "hard boiled" detective fiction usually was. The film nonetheless was not a huge box office hit, perhaps due to its somewhat less than charismatic stars, Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels. One thing the 1931 version had going for it was its frank and often overt sexuality, courtesy of being pre-Code. That meant when Warner went to re-release the film some years later, once the Code had been imposed upon all the majors, they found their 1931 Falcon was unreleasable. (In fact it became next to impossible to see the original unedited 1931 Falcon for decades after its initial release). That led to the second version of Hammett's iconic story to hit the screen, the sad debacle known as Satan Met a Lady. Though Bette Davis might seem the perfect femme fatale, at least from the scheming if not from the sexually alluring side, and in fact does rather well in the film, Satan is an often devilishly dull film that never really makes a great deal of sense, even as it slightly twists several events in Hammett's original conception. And that of course brings us to the hallowed ground of John Huston's 1941 adaptation, a film that supposedly jump started both the noir genre (questionable at the very least) and Humphrey Bogart's post-gangster role career (inarguable, at least according to Bogie himself). Though 1939 is often cited as the apex of the Hollywood studio system, convincing argument can really be made for any subsequent year, at least through 1943 or 1944, so ubiquitous are the classics which seemingly spilled from the major studios on a weekly basis. 1941 was no exception, with a laundry list of films which still top most critics' all-time classics list (Citizen Kane, anyone?), and Huston's version of The Maltese Falcon is certainly among the top two or three films released that year, which certainly places it at or near any reasonable film fan's all time greatest compendium. Humphrey Bogart portrays Sam Spade, a private detective who, courtesy of both Hammett and Huston, is the walking embodiment of every tougher than nails investigator you could ever imagine. Within seconds of the film's opening, Spade is in the throes of a professional (and perhaps hopefully romantic) relationship with a mysterious femme fatale, one Ruth Wonderly (Mary Astor), who hires Spade and his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) to tail a man. When Archer is murdered at a planned rendezvous that evening, Spade is propelled forward on an at times insanely complex turn of events which ultimately brings him into contact with three of the most iconic villains to ever blacken the screen, Kasper Gutman, also known as The Fat Man (Sydney Greenstreet), Gutman's deviant right hand man, Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), and their hapless, somewhat dimwitted gunslinger, Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.). Though The Maltese Falcon makes a least a little more sense than the most famously confusing of noirs, The Big Sleep, it still has its share of odd plot developments, and the fact is that the ultimate "prize" that everyone is seeking (and never actually obtains), the eponymous Maltese falcon, turns out to be one of the best examples of what Alfred Hitchock termed a "MacGuffin," the "mechanical plot element" which drives the story forward and gives the characters their putative motivations. It's a little fascinating (not to mention ironic), then, that we only find out about the falcon after the film has wended a rather twisty course through at least two murders and several near misses for Spade. Though Huston was marginally more restrained than Roy Del Ruth needed to be in his 1931 pre-Code version, this film is unusually provocative, albeit subtly so, for a mainstream 1941 film. While the 1931 version made few bones about the homosexuality of Wilmer and Cairo, here Huston dances just this side of then accepted morés, with Cairo proffering a heavily perfumed card and Wilmer repeatedly proving he's unable to dominate anyone, even with several guns at his disposal. As politically incorrect as it is to suggest such things now, there was a rather pronounced double standard when it came to portraying women of ill repute back in the 1940s, and Huston didn't need to pull as many censorial punches to bring the duplicitous Ruth Wonderly (or is that Brigid O'Shaughnessy?) to the screen as he did having to handle the "gay element." As Eric Lax mentions in his excellent commentary, this is a film where every cog in the wheel of the studio system was working in tandem to produce remarkable results. While Warner never really had the depth in their "bench" of supporting players that Metro did, where else could you get such a patently bizarre assortment of actors like Greenstreet, Lorre and Cook? This trio virtually emanates degradation from their very pores, and gives the film its rather unseemly subtext. But it's the star duo of Bogart and Astor that remain front and center, and rightfully so. Bogart is near perfection in this role, a character he rightly saw as his ticket out of second billing in villain roles. Probably under Huston's watchful eye, there's little grandstanding and virtually no typical "Bogie" mannerisms here. Everything is cut to the bone, lean and powerful. If Astor was a little long of tooth to be playing an irresistable seductress, her intelligence and almost genteel quality make her a force to be reckoned with. Her final scene with Bogart is a classic of sustained understatement. John Huston scaled the heights to writer-director greatness with this film, launching his auteur status at a time when very few had attained that privileged title. It's rather interesting in fact to contrast Huston with Columbia's Frank Capra and Paramount's Preston Sturges, and the short-lived, tumultuous reign of Orson Welles at RKO. Huston's contribution to the Warner culture of this period cannot be underestimated, and The Maltese Falcon proved irrefutably that he was a great deal more than merely Walter's son. Seventy years after its release, The Maltese Falcon remains perhaps the prime example of the hard-boiled detective genre. Huston and company succeeded, and it's little wonder why no one felt the need to try again after this monumental 1941 effort. The Maltese Falcon is simply as good as it gets in virtually every department. Bogart has never been better, the supporting cast is terrific, and the film teeters just on the edge of some very depraved behavior, making it a fascinatingly provocative feature for the relatively prim world of 1941. John Huston became a titan overnight with the release of this film, and it's still easy to see why 70 years later. While I have some minor quibbles with this Blu-ray, more reasonable souls out there probably won't. Very highly recommended. IMDb Rating (07/25/14): 8.2/10 from 89,021 users Top 250: #151 IMDb Rating (05/08/11): 8.4/10 from 56,368 users Top 250: #103 IMDb Rating (10/15/07): 8.4/10 from 32,806 users Top 250: #60 IMDb Rating (05/01/01): 8.5/10 from 7,559 users Top 250: #37
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