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Similar To: Glengarry Glen Ross, LA Confidential, Brick
Summary: A private detective takes on a case that involves him and three eccentric criminals, a gorgeous liar, and their quest for a priceless statuette.
While there are a few movies on my List of Shame that I’m a little apprehensive of sitting down and watching (Seven Samurai and I have a long history of missed movie nights together) The Maltese Falcon was not one of them. Here is the prototypical hard-boiled detective story. I’ve seen and enjoyed many films that pay homage to it, but I’ve never seen the original itself. This is also the first of several John Huston movies on my list and his directorial debut. I was ready to like this movie. It was with surprise, then, that I laughed out loud about ten minutes into it. And then again ten minutes later.
We didn’t exactly believe your story, Miss O’Shaughnessy. We believed your 200 dollars.
Essentially the movie is has two merits: its dialogue and the “mystery.” Five minutes into the story, before anyone can possibly care, Sam Spade’s (Bogart’s) partner is murdered in a crime that Spade is soon accused of. The only way out of prison for him is to involve himself with the murderers, find the item they’re looking for (hint: it’s in the title), and figure out who is backstabbing whom before he turns the entire lot into the police.
Understatement is the only crime these characters won’t commit. Everyone speaks in rapid-fire metaphor that sometimes elevates the dialogue to it’s own kind of poetry. Until watching the movie I’d never realized that this was how David Mamet’s characters sound. Like the dialogue in Glengarry Glen Ross, you know this isn’t the way real people talk to each other but you can appreciate the verbal gymnastics the way you might enjoy an intricate choreographed dance.
It isn’t long into the film before both of those two things begin to wear thin. For a crime movie, a remarkable amount of nothing actually happens. There are two other murders significant to the plot besides Spade’s partner and both of them take place off-screen to characters that we’ve never met. Most of the rest of the scenes are just people pacing around talking about events that we never got to see but sound a lot more interesting than what we’re watching.
Over the teeth and through the gums!
When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.
My main issue, though, is that I have no idea who I’m supposed to like. Even an anti-hero needs a cause we can identify with. Spade never shows any motivation other than saving his own skin. That might have been enough to keep my interest if he wasn’t a giant ass. In the first few minutes of the movie we come to find out he’s sleeping with his partner’s wife, who he loses interest in after his partner dies. When Ms. O’Shaughnessy (his client) asks, terrified, what else she can pay him with since she’s run out of money, Sam grabs her face and forces a creepy kiss on her. Later he rubs her neck almost erotically while describing her hanging from the gallows. Mostly he just comes off as a bully. There are only two characters in the movie I found pitiable, Peter Lorre and the young thug Wilmer, and Sam spends most of the movie humiliating them. There’s actually a scene where Spade makes Peter Lorre punch himself in the face before displaying this bizzare rapist-like ‘I’m about to dominate you,’ grin and then knocking the tiny man out.
Brigid O’Shaunessy, Spade’s client, is a pathological liar. She never shows any interest in Spade physically until he expresses his willingness to trade his services for sexual favors. This leads to an unmotivated exchange at the end. Spade is telling her he’s going to turn her in and living out his weird gallows fetish while he talks and she blurts out how much she loves him. Because she’s been lying about everything the entire movie, nobody cares. Spade says maybe he does love her too, but because he’s creepy, weird, and was just talking about her stretched neck on the gallows it just makes you feel icky.
"What does this remind you offffff?"
Peter Lorre’s character Joel Cairo is likable but I’m not sure that he’s supposed to be. Cairo is a waifish and very well dressed man of a some miscellaneous ethnicity. Before he makes his first entrance to the film, Spade and his secretary spend a moment giggling about how Cairo’s business card smells like gardenias. When he speaks with Spade about the Falcon he does so in a soft raspy voice, all the time the end of his phallic silver cane poised just on the tip of his lips. Is it any wonder this guy has the tiniest gun in the movie? Not like Sam Spade of course. We know he’s a good guy because he calls all the women in the movie ‘doll’ and ‘sweetheart’ and he punches out the fa…I…I mean…bad guys.
Perhaps the most likable character in the entire movie is the young thug Wilmer. Wilmer is dressed in a jacket and hat too big for him, his ears tucked underneath its brim. He’s soft spoken, supplying the least amount of dialogue of any of the main characters. He does have the only moment of genuine emotion in the entire movie. When Spade is scheming with the Fat Man (Wilmer’s boss) about who to pin the murders on, Spade suggests that Wilmer should be the fall guy. Wilmer is pained. He rises from his chair and confronts Spade, his face a mask of anger – tears rolling down his cheeks. We see in his eyes anguish, perhaps from a hard childhood growing up on the streets of San Francisco, or maybe a lifetime spent suppressing his homosexuality. We feel the weight this betrayal has had on him and all his desire to prove his value…then Spade punches him in the face.
The stuff dreams are made of…and you should go have those dreams
Despite it’s ‘out-dated’ sensibilities there is much here to enjoy. The film is visually arresting with it’s low-angles and sparse lighting. The dialogue is entertaining. I can see how important it was in establishing many of the conventions of the film noir genre. The problem is at this point those conventions have been purified, refined, and used to create movies more compelling. And while I can appreciate the Maltese Falcon because those movies may not have existed without it, I’d still rather spend an evening with them instead.
Verdict: Skip
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