April 11: The Maltese Falcon (1941 -- John Huston)

★★★★★

Oh yeah, it’s all that.  For sure.

Popped this in the player for an hour and a half of fun, and I got all of that.  Everything I’ve always heard about this film is there…in Spades (pardon the pun).  The noir lighting adds drama with big shadows cast across faces and behind characters, the tough guy detective tries to cope with the femme fatale, a sense of omnipresent bad permeates.  Everything I know about John Huston makes me think this would be a great fit for him.  I was even surprised at how compelling Boogie’s acting was.

But what I enjoyed so much here is the script.  This is a movie about a man confronting mystery and who has to generate story after story in order to try to understand. even survive.  I shouted out loud at the bravura moment when the police, questioning Sam at his door, hear a sound inside and shove past Sam to find a fight just ending in the apartment.  Sam generates three or four explanations in such rapid succession that I could hardly keep them straight, each perfectly cogent and each explaining the rapidly changing facts at hand.  In fact, even the characters comment on Sam’s fabulation skills at this point.  Throughout the movie, Sam is trying to build a story to include all the info he’s discovering; he not only wants to discover a story that will fit the facts he knows…his very survival is at stake because, if he fails, he dies.  All detective stories involve the creation of a narrative to explain information, but few do so to the degree that The Maltese Falcon does.  And with such great style, suspense and characters.  The Maltese Falcon is a movie about a story-teller who is making stories to live. 

And I always like the dark side of Huston’s films.  I think of Huston as an American existentialist who doesn’t let his aspirations ever get far outside his pessimistic expectations.  Therefore, you can be sure that no one is telling the full truth here and that no one will do what they say for the reasons they give.  The closing lines of the movie pretty much sum up what I expect in the world of a Huston film. At the end, the ultimate betrayal is revealed when all those concerned discover that the falcon is a fake, that it’s actually lead instead of coated gold.  The erstwhile detective, who doesn’t know what’s been happening, asks what the falcon is, and Sam replies that it’s the stuff that dreams are made of.  That’s Huston’s world, and after a steady diet of Battle: Los Angeles and The Adjustment Bureau, I find that refreshing.