August 6th, 2019 | Updated on August 11th, 2022
Spade and Archer is the name of a San Francisco detective agency. That’s for Sam Spade and Miles Archer. The two men are partners, but Sam doesn’t like Miles much.
A knockout, who goes by the name of Miss Wonderly, walks into their office; and by that night everything’s changed. Miles is dead.
It seems Miss Wonderly is surrounded by dangerous men. There’s Joel Cairo, who uses gardenia-scented calling cards. There’s Kasper Gutman, with his enormous girth and feigned civility.
Her only hope of protection comes from Sam, who is suspected by the police of one or the other murder. More murders are yet to come, and it will all be because of these dangerous men — and their lust for a statuette of a bird: the Maltese Falcon.
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Movie Reviews: “The Maltese Falcon”
Movie Review: Hollywood Reporter
On Oct. 3, 1941, Warner Bros. premiered thriller The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. The film, nominated for three Academy Awards, has since become a noir classic. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below.
Another prize package from Warners, The Maltese Falcon is going to be one of the most profitable and talked about pictures of the year.
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Movie Review: NEW REPUBLIC
The Maltese Falcon is the first crime melodrama with finish, speed and bang to come along in what seems ages, and since its pattern is one of the best things Hollywood does, we have been missing it.
It is the old Dashiell Hammett book, written back in the days when you could turn out a story and leave it at that, without any characters joining the army, fleeing as refugees or reforming bad boys, men or women.
It is hokum, all right about a historic image so costly with gold and jewels that people follow it all over the world, plotting to get it away from other people similarly employed, the various forces finally converging in the territory of Sam Spade, a detective.
But John Huston has written the screen play and directed the picture so that a fast pace and direct, vigorous approach give a surface meaning to each situation as it follows another.
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Movie Review: Starburst Magazine
The Maltese Falcon. Revered by film studies tutors across the land and often trotted out as (possibly) the first and one of the finest examples of a MacGuffin centred plot in cinematic history.
Oh, and it could be said the definitive ‘Film Noir’ too.
Huston’s obsession with keeping the film under budget resulted in a near-fetishistic fastidiousness that produced an eye for detail rarely rivalled since.
Every inch of the celluloid was mapped out months before being put behind the lens. With this film, black and white found its zenith, with very little room for grey.
Those low angled shots remind us we are down in the dirt and this Blu-Ray release only accentuates those shafts of light across the face, now synonymous with the noir style.
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