The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Film: The Maltese Falcon

Director: John Huston

Country: USA

Released: October 1941

Runtime: 101 minutes

Genre: Film Noir

Studio: Warner Bros

Influenced: Howard Hawks, Carol Reed, Billy Wilder, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Zemeckis

Citizen Kane's immediate impact on cinema can be seen very clearly in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, which was released the same year, and uses a similar visual style to that of Gregg Toland, deep focus and deep staging of the actors at varying distances from the lens. Also noticeable is how the more sinister characters, such as Joel Cairo – played by Peter Lorre of M (Fritz Lang) fame – and heavy-set businessman Kasper Gutman – played by Sydney Greenstreet – are filmed from low angles.

John Huston’s faithful adaptation of Dashiel Hammett's detective novel was his first movie, and the carefully crafted set designs and hardboiled dialogue capture the essence of the book so well. Huston's was the third attempt at adapting Hammett’s labyrinthine 1930 novel for the screen; the first was hidden away in the Hollywood vault for its references to sex and gay relationships (faithful to the book, but in breach of the Hays Code), while the second attempt bombed at the box office. Huston deserves enormous credit for transferring Hammett’s dark & dangerous San Francisco to the screen successfully.

There's no point providing a synopsis of the plot, it's devilishly complicated and would take longer to write than it takes to watch the film. Suffice to say that the Maltese Falcon is a mysterious jewelled ornament once offered in tribute by the Knights Templar in the 16th century to King of Spain Charles V. Humphrey Bogart is sublime as Sam Spade, a mixture of steeliness, explosive anger and ruthlessness. He was an unlikely star man, and a departure for Hollywood from the likes of Cary Grant and Henry Fonda, not as classically good looking but exuding his own raw sexuality. The way he disarms various people of their gun is effortless cool and defiant.

Bogart is backed by a wonderful cast, not least the menacingly brilliant Lorre as Joel Cairo, but also Mary Astor as the mysterious femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy and Gladys George as Iva Archer, both love interests for Sam Spade. Perhaps the film's greatest legacy is how it set the tone for film noirs to follow – Huston's visual and writing techniques would be taken to an even greater extreme in later film noir classics like Double Indemnity (1944) and The Third Man (1949).