Retrospective Film Review

The Maltese Falcon (1941) • 80 Years Later

After his business partner is mysteriously shot, private detective Sam Spade finds himself plunged into a web of plotting and deceit.

At first glance, The Maltese Falcon might seem like just another hardboiled, wisecracking tale of a gumshoe and a femme fatale, but John Huston’s directorial debut is so much more than that. And not only because it was the first major film noir, at least in some accounts of that tricky-to-define style’s development, as The Maltese Falcon is daring and original on so many levels.

It’s a film about discovering the truth which leaves truth unresolved and imprecise (resembling its even more famous predecessor from the same year, Citizen Kane). It’s startingly meta, frequently drawing attention to its own theatricality, its characters frequently discussing the way they’re all engaged in fiction. It’s a film where the romance between the leading man and the leading lady is almost overshadowed by the presence, extraordinary for 1941, of so many gay men; Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade is, in fact, the…