Critics reviews

I've seen The Maltese Falcon countless times, and had it not been for the relative paucity of juicy choices in the other Friday-morning time slots I might have decided on seeing something else. But as it turned out, experiencing the 1941 film with a packed house who knew every line, every story beat, every raised eyebrow among its stellar cast far better than I did, only magnified just how delightful, how straight-faced _funny_ it really is.

Huston employed a stylistic continuity rare in any genre; barring a few night scenes, he shot the rest in sequence. The story takes the viewer from Spade and Brigid's initial meeting to a bleak finale that anticipates the amorality of future film noirs.

Made after he spent years working as a screenwriter, Huston's sure-footed directorial debut, "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), etched with bitter clarity, brought out a compelling complexity in Humphrey Bogart and revitalized the detective genre.

The linear narrative takes the viewer from Spade and Brigid's initial meeting to a bleak finality that anticipates the amoral quality of future film noirs.

Let's talk about the black bird, by all means. Hammett's albatross, from the Knights Templar of Malta to the shamus' Frisco agency, the fabulous "dingus" at the center of John Huston's first whirlpool of seekers and patsies... Floating through the murky ether is "a swell lot of thieves," as vivid as Chester Gould panels: Astor's alluring scent of danger, Lorre's sublime swivels from civility to giggles to tears, Greenstreet's jolly follia in the face of failure.