The Maltese Falcon

(1941, directed by John Huston)

- inducted 2016 –

“Calling The Maltese Falcon a perfect movie is something of a double-edged sword, if one means to split hairs. Its leanness, precision, ceaseless forward motion, and quotability leave little room for the kind of artistic and dramatic risks that characterize swing-for-the-fences auteurist masterpieces, to say nothing of dramatic depth. On the other hand, perfect. Bogart is perfect. Mary Astor is perfect. Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet are perfect. Ward Bond and Barton McClain are perfect. Gladys George is perfect. John Huston's script of Dashiell Hammett's novel is perfect. Huston's mise-en-scene is arch, and deliberate, built around overtly stagy physical gestures—Elisha Cook (who, lest we forget, is also perfect) tipping his newspaper down to reveal his paranoid, seething face, Bogart punching his hand as he barks a laugh, Walter ‘the director's father’ Huston staggering in and dying in exactly the right place—because that's what this express train of a narrative needs.

“The Maltese Falcon inaugurated the era of film noir, and its elusive object of desire embodied what future aspirants sought in working within the form: ‘the stuff that dreams are made of.’ Sam Spade, per Hammett, ‘has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and, in their cockier moments, thought they approached.’ That sounds about right.

“It's also probably the most rewatchable movie ever made. I already rewatched it once to write this thing, now just writing about it makes me want to go back and rewatch it again.”

~ Danny Bowes