Spike Lee’s Essential Films (SLEF) — Episode 12: The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Inspired by my friend Krishan’s 2016 goal to watch 100 films from 100 different countries, my dad and I have tasked ourselves with the similar project to watch all the films on Spike Lee’s Essential Films list. Every week we’ll try and have a quick conversation about what we just watched.

The list was picked out from a shortlist of many, on the basis that there are about 50 films on it that we have both not seen, and that cross a wide variety of genres, years, countries etc. I am not particularly a fan of Spike Lee as a director, but I do believe he has good taste!

We are using the site www.icheckmovies.com to track our progress. It’s a site I highly endorse for all film nerds and list lovers — you can find my profile here.

This week we watched The Maltese Falcon.

Brief Synopsis: A private detective takes on a case that involves him with three eccentric criminals, a gorgeous liar, and their quest for a priceless statuette.

David: 12 episodes in, this marks the first film that either of us have seen before. I watched it few years back, but I’m a little rusty on it.

Mick: I can’t even remember if I’d seen it before, but I probably had.

David: First time round I wasn’t a fan. Second time round… still not a fan.

Mick: I was enjoying it, I liked it until it got to the last 20 minutes or so. Instead of any action or plot, the “fat man” just explained all the interesting gaps in the story, but you didn’t get to actually see any of it. A bit like the big reveal at the end of a Miss Marple. As if they’d run out of time or budget with the film.

David: Well, you criticize the ending for being rushed, the whole first hour was a whirlwind, jumping about willy nilly. It felt very artificial.

Mick: It definitely felt like celluloid was expensive. Everything had to happen quickly, Bogie had to explain everything as quickly as possible, judging by the speed at which he reeled off some of his lines.

David: And to me this added to how artificial it felt. The film felt as foreign to me as a sci-fi or foreign film. Such is the lack of rational human behaviour. Such is the lack of normal conversation. I just found it utterly unrelatable.

Mick: It is what it is, which is a cheap comic book crime thriller. I don’t think it’s pretending to be anything more. It certainly lacks subtlety and finesse, but is that necessarily something that should be held against it?

Mick: Let’s talk about slapping. These were the good old days where you only had to punch a fella once to knock him out. Compare that to some of the fight scenes today, featuring protagonists taking unceasing barrages of blows. It’s an interesting comparison that I’ve never considered before.

David: I think it’s a censorship thing. The same way there was a recognised time limit to on-screen kisses, and nothing more sexually explicit could be shown, I think depictions of excessive violence (or perhaps realistic violence) were something that Hollywood frowned upon.

Mick: We do have in this one probably the best line in film history about slapping — “When you’re slapped you’ll take it and you’ll like it!”

David: Humphrey telling it like it is!

Mick: It’s a dialogue film at heart. It’s all about Bogart’s quick wit and the back and forth between the characters. But mainly it’s all about Bogart. It’s a first person movie; Bogart is in, and dominates, every single scene. The only time he’s absent is for the barely 10 second scene in which his partner is killed.

David: And I don’t think this is a clever filmmaking decision, merely a lazy storytelling decision. The effect of this is the only character we ever trust is Bogie. Even though he’s an adulterer, corrupt and generally just a bit of a dick.

Mick: This is symptomatic of the era though. Bogart was the big draw. The people came to the cinema to see Humphrey. I think when we watch Casablanca the situation will be much the same.

David: One thing I can always appreciate in a film is legacy. And The Maltese Falcon has an important legacy as the prototypical MacGuffin — “ a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrativeexplanation.” [thanks for that Wikipedia] But it feels to me like an inherently cheap concept. As you said before it’s a comic-book film, and the MacGuffin is a comic-book device, as if the audience were not smart enough to grasp a more complicated plot.

Mick: What we have to remember is that when this film was made they had been making films for 25 years. We’ve had 75 years of film history on top of this, and we’re used to a better standard now. It’s quite easy to criticize some elements of this film, sitting in 2016, but watching it in 1941 you’d have probably taken a very different view.

David: But you say that as if I’ve never seen a film from the 1940s. There are tons of smart, innovative films that hold up perfectly well from that era. I think most strikingly Casablanca, which we’ll be watching at some point soon no doubt.

Mick: What I liked about the film was that Bogart has a great screen presence. But the supporting characters are an interesting ensemble too, particularly the male characters, Joel Cairo and the fat man. Peter Lorre is always highly watchable, even when his characters (as is the case here) are slightly absurd. On the other hand the female characters didn’t get many good lines at all. Just a bunch of damsels in distress. Not a film for feminists…

David: One thing I liked: there was some great uses of shadows in this one. Again, not in a very subtle manner, but the detectives names stencilled on the office windows were an effective symbol of Sam Spade’s arrogance and egotism.

David: The problem I have with The Maltese Falcon, and it’s the same problem I have with a lot of so-called classics, is that the film views like a play. The characters sit on stage and over the course of 100 minutes slowly release the details of the plot in a compelling order. For someone with a limited attention span such as myself, it takes really great acting to carry this off. It is the same reason I’m not a big fan of A Streetcar Named Desire or The Grapes of Wrath or many other “classics”.

Mick: I understand what you say, and I agree with lots of that. However I did find the movie kept my attention, and that is an important counterpoint to for me. I found some of the characters interesting. That being said, the plot fizzles out big time at the end of the film, which is not the way you want to finish. Overall I was still entertained by it, so I am going to give it 7.5/10.

David: It didn’t do anything for me. The end of the film is painfully lacking the killer twist that could redeem it. Even the famous line — “the stuff that dreams are made of” — has been completely overstated through the course of history, and is delivered with something of a whimper, compared at least to what I was expecting it to be. Bogart’s character is a true antihero, but I don’t think just because he’s bad does he deserve to be considered a legendary film character. A disappointing 6/10 from me.

Join us next week when we watch Fat City.