The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon is a film from 1941 and is a film noir classic. The film is about a private detective Sam Spade who helps people find what they are looking for. He has a partner Miles who is not too fond of as well. In the beginning of the film Sam is hired by a gorgeous woman by the name of Miss Wonderly, who needs his help initially needs his help to find her "sister." When Sam helps her that evening everything falls apart with his partner being killed, along with the man that Miss Wonderly wanted watched. Sam knows that instantly something is wrong and starts his search to figure out the reasoning behind all that had happened.

Sam confronts Miss Wonderly, who he finds out has been lying all along not just about her name, but about what she was really looking for. Her real name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and she explains the story of the Maltese falcon and that she us really on the search for that and not her sister. In the search for this falcon Sam runs into other characters such is Joel Cairo and Casper Gutman who are also after the falcon, and Sam ends up working with all them for a number of different money offers to find the falcon that is so desired by all of these different characters. By the end of the film Sam is doing everything that he can to figure out the number of murders and other crimes that have happened throughout the film, and he realizes how many people have tried to fool him as well, and when he figures out who is behind all of the scandal he has a number of mixed feelings about the outcome of the story.

The entire film is run by murder, money, sex, and greed. It is a classic film noir film because of its entire plot and setting. From the majority of the movie being shot at night on the rain soaked streets of San Fransisco, the classic 1940's wardrobe, the femme fatale because she is a damsel in distress but she is also dangerous and using her feminine mystique to get her way at times as well, with the overwhelming amount of crime and murder that is throughout the entire film as well, and the morale ambiguity that is present in each and every scene of this film.

For me personally I really enjoyed this film, it may have had something to do with Humphrey Bogart as the main character, but I really enjoyed it because there was such a pull between what was right and what was wrong for these characters, and even though most of the time they chose wrong, they knew what they were doing and that in itself was what drew me into each of the individual relationships that each character had with Sam. This film is a great film to demonstrate the classic Film Noir Style in a number of ways, and it is a film that is not only about the search for something that you desire, but about the moral pull within oneself to do what is right versus what is wrong.