The Maltese Falcon (1941)

A cynical, game-changing debut from a Hollywood legend.

Directed by: John Huston

Cinematography by: Arthur Edeson

Country: United States

Genre: Noir/Mystery/Crime

Maverick filmmaker and legendary Hollywood rebel John Huston began his career penning screenplays in the early 1930s before he decided to sit in the director’s chair. Adapting Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, Huston created one of the most influential directorial debut’s in film history, and popularized a new genre: the film-noir.

Economically filmed, often psychological crime-dramas, characterized by heavy use of shadows, grim endings, cynical anti-heroes, sardonic femme fatales, moral ambiguity, corruption, and the sense that the characters’ fates are out of their own hands, film-noir was a dark turn for moviemaking, seen by many as an artistic reflection of people’s growing disillusionment with the world in reaction to the rise of the Nazi party and atrocities of WWII.

Aside from the metamorphic content, what made The Maltese Falcon such an auspicious debut is the sublime confidence that Huston directed with. The skillset that typically defines an advanced filmmaker seemed to be inherent in him; whether in spite of or because of the film’s low budget, Huston was able to persuasively demonstrate his uncanny knack for forcing perspective, expertly harnessing the formal aspects of framing, staging, space, camera placement, lighting, eyeline-matches, and actor’s posture to guide the viewer’s eye around the screen and visually tell a story.

—Ahoy matey: Spoilers ahead—

One thing I didn’t notice until I uploaded the pictures into my draft folder is the layered symbolism in the last photo of the set. To set it up, the film follows a private detective, Sam Spade, whose partner is murdered after they take a missing persons case from a mysterious woman. Shortly thereafter, Spade is hired to locate “the Maltese Falcon,” a small statuette of incomparable value.

Over the course of the film Spade falls for the secretive woman, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and also finds out that she’s involved in a scheme to steal and sell the Maltese Falcon. By the end, the statuette is found, but turns out to be a fake, and Spade realizes that O’Shaughnessy, the woman he’s fallen in love with, is the same person that killed his partner, and turns her in to the police. We can see the devastation and conflict on Spade’s shadowed face in the second-to-last image as he wrestles between his feelings for O’Shaughnessy and his desire for justice for his partner’s murder, especially as a first-degree murder charge in California in the 40s likely means death row for her.

However, it’s the triple symbolism in final photo of O’Shaughnessy being escorted away by the police that I’ve become wildly impressed by.

We have:
A. The elevator gates resembling the bars of a jail cell, leaving no doubt about where she’s headed;
B. A shadow falling over half of her face, hiding her eye, representing the character’s two-faced deceitfulness; and
C. The coolest part, Huston showing the mark of a true artist, the way the gate’s shadow falling over O’Shaughnessy’s face looks like the talon of a bird of prey - sort of a poetic irony symbolizing that the murderous greed and moral corruption of capturing the statuette manifested into a falcon itself, swooping back to catch her in its grips rather than vice versa, sealing her fate.

Distributed by: Warner Bros.