The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon is frighteningly good evidence that the British (Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, et al.) have no monopoly on the technique of making mystery films. A remake of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled mystery, it is rich raw beef right off the U.S. range. Read full review

An almost perfect visual equivalent of the Dashiell Hammett thriller...It is (and this is rare in American films) a work of entertainment that is yet so skillfully constructed that after many years and many viewings it has the same brittle explosiveness - and even some of the same surprise - that it had in its first run.

The strange, dreamlike tension of the film escalates with each new confrontation, each new tailing, each new beating, with Gutman and Cairo shot from a queasy low angle, and the nightmare culminates in a gripping series of closeups on each strained face. Read full review

The movie is essentially a series of conversations punctuated by brief, violent interludes. It's all style. It isn't violence or chases, but the way the actors look, move, speak and embody their characters. Read full review

The Maltese Falcon is an unassailable triumph of script, casting, direction and editing. Read full review

The film that brought the detective movie into the modern world, complete with novel film-noir techniques (shadows, low-angled shots, anti-heroes and duplicitous dames) and assembled one of the most enjoyable casts ever to play off each other. Read full review

It's the slickest exercise in cerebration that has hit the screen in many months, and it is also one of the most compelling nervous-laughter provokers yet. Read full review

On a number of accounts it is distinguished celluloid entertainment, but it is of great interest to the trade because it reveals, in startling terms, the unheralded talent of topflight scenarist, John Huston, who, in the dual capacity of writer and director of this picture, is now entitled to take his place among the most important creative artists in the industry. Read full review

This is one of the best examples of actionful and suspenseful melodramatic story telling in cinematic form. Unfolding a most intriguing and entertaining murder mystery, picture displays outstanding excellence in writing, direction, acting and editing--combining in overall as a prize package of entertainment for widest audience appeal. Read full review

A stunning directorial debut from screenwriter John Huston. Read full review

Boldly manipulating light and shadow, utilizing drastic camera angles, and introducing Bogart’s Sam Spade, the first-time director’s detective classic defines film noir. Read full review

The Maltese Falcon might not have been the first film noir, or even the most stylish, but all the genre elements are smartly in place here: the dark streets, the treacherous female, the monogrammed office door, the breathless smart talk. Bogart saying "When you're slapped you'll take it and like it" should feel like a cliché, but the freshness remains, the thrilling sense that nobody had ever talked like this in a movie before. Read full review

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. Read full review

What makes it a prototype film noir is the vein of unease missing from the two earlier versions of Hammett's novel. Filmed almost entirely in interiors, it presents a claustrophobic world animated by betrayal, perversion and pain, never - even at its most irresistibly funny, as when Cook listens in outraged disbelief while his fat sugar daddy proposes to sell him down the line - quite losing sight of this central abyss of darkness, ultimately embodied by Mary Astor's sadly duplicitous siren. Read full review

With Hammett's dialogue incorporated virtually verbatim into the screenplay, Bogart in top form, and Huston allowed total directorial freedom, watching this first of the films noir is an experience to be embraced. Read full review

The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur? Read full review