{"id":5398,"date":"2018-12-06T22:47:17","date_gmt":"2018-12-07T03:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=5398"},"modified":"2018-12-06T22:48:44","modified_gmt":"2018-12-07T03:48:44","slug":"the-maltese-falcon-an-ocf-classic-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2018\/12\/06\/the-maltese-falcon-an-ocf-classic-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The Maltese Falcon \u2013 An OCF Classic Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in late October of 2016 I reviewed Dashiell Hammett\u2019s crime novel \u201cThe Maltese Falcon.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 To describe the review as highly enthusiastic would be an understatement.\u00a0 I raved about the book.\u00a0 Well, I\u2019ll almost repeat the performance for John Huston\u2019s film.\u00a0 There are differences, of course.\u00a0 And if you had read the book before seeing the movie you\u2019d feel that both Bogart and Astor were physically miscast.\u00a0 But the movie on its own merits is superb.<\/p>\n

John Huston based the movie quite faithfully on Hammett\u2019s book.\u00a0 Humphrey Bogart is Sam Spade, one half of the San Francisco based private detective firm of Spade and Archer. He\u2019s also his partner Miles Archer\u2019s wife Iva\u2019s former lover (now that\u2019s a complicated sentence!).<\/p>\n

The story opens up with Spade\u2019s secretary, Effie Perine, announcing a new client, Miss Wonderly (played by Mary Astor).\u00a0 Wonderly starts telling a tale to Spade and also Archer as he walks in during the story.\u00a0 The story is a fabrication about a make-believe teen-age sister who has been spirited away cross country by a real gangster named Floyd Thursby.\u00a0 Spade and Archer agree to tail Thursby in return for some also very real hundred dollar bills that Wonderly pays them.<\/p>\n

Archer is shot and killed during his surveillance and this begins a sequence of events that involves Spade in a confusing search for the truth about a globe-trotting quest to obtain the legendary Maltese Falcon.\u00a0 We meet corpulent Caspar Gutman played by Sidney Greenstreet, who is the ringleader behind the search.\u00a0 Then there is Joel Cairo, played by Peter Lorre, a mincing effeminate who sometimes works for Gutman and sometimes doesn\u2019t.\u00a0 There is Wilmer Cook, Gutman\u2019s young triggerman who would rather shoot his opponents than negotiate terms.\u00a0 And finally, we have the good cop\/ bad cop duo of Detective Tom Polhaus and Lieutenant Dundy.\u00a0 They show up at strategic moments to inform Spade that he is everyone\u2019s favorite suspect in several murders.<\/p>\n

The exact details of the plot are too much fun to spoil so I won\u2019t go into much detail but suffice it to say there really aren\u2019t any innocent parties involved unless you include Effie Perine.\u00a0 Wonderly, which isn\u2019t the last fake name she\u2019ll go by in the film is up to her neck in the crimes but she becomes Spade\u2019s femme fatale in the story.\u00a0 Spade is a ruthless but strangely honorable character who lives by his own logic.\u00a0 The criminals (almost everyone) spend the entire movie double-crossing each other in various iterations.\u00a0 They all prove, with some prodding from Spade, that there is indeed no honor among thieves.\u00a0 But the plot moves along smartly and by the end all the loose ends are neatly tied up and Sam Spade is sort of the last man standing.\u00a0 Bogart even gets to apply an ironic tagline to describe the futility of the whole mad enterprise.<\/p>\n

When I said that Bogart and Astor were physically miscast it\u2019s because in the book Spade is described as a tall muscular blond-haired man.\u00a0 Bogart is none of those things.\u00a0 And in the book Mary Astor\u2019s character is a woman in her twenties which at the point when this movie was made could hardly describe Astor.\u00a0 Regardless, they make the characters their own.\u00a0 And especially Bogart\u2019s Spade is iconic and basically defines the Sam Spade character for most of the people who have heard of the Maltese Falcon.\u00a0 The rest of the cast is also excellent.\u00a0 Greenstreet and Lorre are so interesting and memorable that at certain points in the movie they push even Bogart out of the spotlight.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve never seen the Maltese Falcon then shame on you.\u00a0 In fact, if I had my way people would read the book first and then watch the movie.\u00a0 But this is a fallen world we live in.\u00a0 So, I guess I\u2019m already asking too much to recommend a black and white movie.\u00a0 Highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in late October of 2016 I reviewed Dashiell Hammett\u2019s crime novel \u201cThe Maltese Falcon.\u201d\u00a0 To describe the review as highly enthusiastic would be an<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,238,237],"tags":[77,1562,1563,78,1240,1573],"class_list":["post-5398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-dashiell-hammett","tag-humphrey-bogart","tag-john-huston","tag-maltese-falcon","tag-peter-lorre","tag-sidney-greenstreet"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Maltese Falcon \u2013 An OCF Classic Movie Review - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2018\/12\/06\/the-maltese-falcon-an-ocf-classic-movie-review\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Maltese Falcon \u2013 An OCF Classic Movie Review - 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