The Maltese Falcon Is A Lot More Bizarre Than You Think

Sometimes a film, or a TV show, or an album comes out and it changes everything. There’s never been anything like it before and every art piece afterwards lives in its presence. The Maltese Falcon is one of those movies. It doesn’t necessarily play like a classic-it’s a comedy wrapped inside a noir film with a bad detective story stapled on top. This is all by design of course. The movie’s grand endeavor is really, perhaps for the first time, capturing a truly realistic sense of noir, one with humor and bite, but also committed to a harsher view of reality if one just scratches the surface. 

In San Francisco, in 1941, Sam Spade runs a P.I. firm with a guy named Miles Archer, who is kind of a goober. A lady (Ms. Wonderley)  shows up and feeds him a simple but muddy story about trailing a guy who helped her sister run away and has also (debatably) kidnapped her. Sam Spade, sends his partner who then gets killed. They suspect he was killed by the guy he was following but, don’t worry, this guy is also killed a few days later. This whole thing obviously seems kind of odd and it turns out the lady is a huge liar and is being hunted by “enemies.” These “enemies” are just a bunch of guys who want to buy the “Maltese Falcon”, a pure gold relic covered in black enamel worth millions. The rest of the movie is basically tense negotiations where Sam Spade tries to figure out what’s going on, then facilitates a deal for the Falcon, which the women from earlier (now going by Brigid O’Shaugnessy) supposedly has a lead on. So basically Sam Spade, our protagonist has to juggle all these balls: get as much money for himself, keep the O’Shaughnessy safe, remain safe himself but also remain in the good graces of O’Shaughnessy’s enemies to be able to negotiate. A boat is burned, some people are killed, but it’s mostly offscreen. 

The plot itself isn’t the point, nor is the action. It’s the film's execution that really gets it top marks. Its pacing set a precedent for future noir films and the script imagined P.I life in a more mundane but grittier way than previous fiction. The film’s characters are brilliant, making each scene engaging to watch even when nothing is really happening. In many ways The Maltese Falcon  is Hollywood’s Waiting For Godot. It’s not about the stated end goal-Godot never shows up. It’s about the journey and the people you meet on the way. 

Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade is a cool but slightly psychopathic P.I. When his partner dies he’s barely sad. The police suspect him of killing his partner because he was sleeping with his partner’s wife. It’s a slight inconvenience for him. He ditches the wife, who has him followed at one point, and sides with “Brigid”, who he also has no respect for. He’s after the money and money seems to be his chief interest at all times. He’s always groveling for more money. In one scene he knocks a man out and immediately goes to take the man’s money from his wallet. The back half of the film comprises of Spade trying to negotiate with the villain, Kasper Gutman or “The Fat Man”, for how to get more money, specifically the most he can reasonably get. At one point he turns down $250,000 (about 5.43 million today). 

Spade doesn’t really come across as money hungry so much as power hungry-he enjoys the feeling of control he can gain in a conflict.  There's a character named Wilmer. Wilmer carries around at least two handguns at all times. Wilmer is a punchline. His guns get stolen from him multiple times, he’s constantly being made fun of, he pouts around the entire movie. He’s pissed too. He hates being made fun of, which makes people make fun of him more. Kid gets no respect. Anyways, at one point, Wilmer is escorting Spade up to talk to the “Fat Man” and Spade casually just reaches in his pocket and steals his guns. He then dangles the pistols in the air like pet toys and turns them into Wilmer’s boss. It’s stuff like this, this power dynamic that Spade loves. 

This power fetish plays perfectly against Mary Astor’s Brigid’s snakey and squirlish ways. She’s a lying, unscrupable women who wants money and is willing to kill to get it, then cry about how she didn’t do it. She’s also neurotic, confusing and hectic. She often gives the impression she herself has no idea what her plan is. She is a frantic, uncertain woman, frustrating and amusing Spade to no end. In one particularly funny scene, she straightens things in the room, then pokes the fire and paces around. After an exchange, Spade quips “Well, are you gonna tell me or are you gonna poke the fire and straighten things around the room again?” He’s a bully and a clever one as well. He detects her dread but is uneasy because she will not tell him the cause. We never really find out. This is a movie that doesn’t thoroughly explain much, in truth. 

There is very little heroism in The Maltese Falcon. Frankly all of the characters could be described as villains. Sam Spade is a greedy Mad Men style misogynist, arrogant and money obsessed. Brigid O’Shaughnessy, as we mentioned before, is a frantic, neurotic sociopath , a character who is untrustworthy almost the first time we meet her and only grows more confounding as the film goes on.  The Fat Man, Karl Gutman, is charming and funny but also conniving, willing to go to any lengths to obtain the Falcon. His frequent remark of “You’re quite a character” to Sam Spade comes across almost as a tick. He’s menacing but also very pleasant for a villain, giving Goldfinger energy years before Goldfinger was a thing. He’s the type of guy who negotiates with his enemies but makes sure to do so in a room full of guns for leverage. The only problem is his goons with guns are idiots and Gutman often has to talk them down from doing something stupid. At one point Wilmer drops a match and catches an entire boat on fire, something that Gutman doesn’t find particularly troubling. 

The Maltese Falcon is at its roots a dialogue driven film. The plot involves murder, vandalism and deception, but most of it happens off screen. It’s rather the delicate discourse between criminals that we are privy to and it is handled so well that the movie feels a little like a thriller despite most of the threatening elements being dressed in humor. It’s a movie rooted in its perspective and as the viewer we are placed firmly on the side of Sam Spade. With the exception of a few scenes the movie follows him exclusively. It is this unique viewpoint that colors the film. From the view of a more serious and less capable this sinister sequence, involving 3 deaths, big money and international conspiracy would be far less humorous and light. But from Spade’s hardened, devil may care point of view this is just another day on the job. 

One particular scene that stood out to me-at the end of the movie, when Spade decides to turn everyone into the police to save himself, he hands in the Falcon as evidence. It’s fake of course. The real Maltese Falcon isn’t in the movie, in fact it’s suggested to be in Russia. Spade hands in the fake Falcon and the police officer says “What is it?” and Spade quips “It’s the stuff dreams are made of.” This struck me as a very layered statement. The Falcon as an idea was the priceless gold artifact that was worth life changing amounts of money. The actual Falcon in the movie is lead, and stretching the black enamel reveals it to be lead all the way through. Spade associating the Falcon with “dreams” points to both the mythological buildup of the Falcon and its similarity with naive aspirations of fame and fortune and Spade’s own disillusionment with those aspirations. For Spade the Falcon is just money. For Brigid and Gutman, the Falcon seems to hold a deeper place in their psyche, a sort of Moby Dick that has consumed their every waking thought. 

The Maltese Falcon may have influenced a lot of movies but seeing that influence does nothing to dilute the movie itself. It's a twisty, windy bit of storytelling with engaging, quirky characters who feel more unique than your usual noir types. It’s a small movie, by today’s standards, but you can hear and see primordial scraps of Han Solo, James Bond, Indiana Jones and a mass of P.I. films that would follow. It’s a movie that is very sure of itself, allowing its unique tone and structure to consolidate across its 90 minute runtime and cinema as an artform is all the better for it.