'The Maltese Falcon' is a mystery classic

The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Gladys George, and Elisha Cook Jr.
Director: John Huston
Rating: Ten of Ten Starts

When private detective Sam Spade (Bogart) tries to solve the mystery surrounding the murder of his partner, he finds himself drawn into a struggle between eccentric treasure hunters (Greenstreet and Lorre) and a beautiful con artist who may or may not also be a coldhearted killer (Astor). At stake is the Maltese Falcon, a treasure of almost unimaginable value.

"The Maltese Falcon" is one of the few movies that truly deserves the label "classic." It's a perfectly paced detective story, with just the right mix of suspense and humor to bring out the maximum effectiveness of both elements as they play off each other.

The characters are quirky and unpredictable to the point where the final outcome of the story remains in question until the final few minutes of the film, and each actor is perfectly cast in their role. Even better, every line of dialogue is perfectly crafted and delivered with spot-on timing.

In fact, everything in this film is about as perfect as a film could possibly be. If you're a fan of the hardboiled detective genre or mysteries in general and you haven't yet seen this masterpiece, you owe it to yourself to change that.

Humphrey Bogart as the deeply flawed hero Sam Spade is particularly excellent in the part, as a man with questionable moral values yet a firm personal code of honor who finds a woman (Mary Astor's Brigid O'Shaughnessy) who at first seems capable of bringing out the best in him, but who ultimately may end up bringing out the absolute worst in him. While Spade is constantly fighting verbally and physically with the Lorre, Cook and Greenstreet's villains, it is Brigid who is Spade's main foil and she turns out to be one of the screen's greatest femme fatales, because Astor brings a vulnerability to a character who may be the hardest of any of the hard cases that populate this story that goes a long way to keeping the mysteries swirling through the plot open questions until the very end. As amusing and dramatic as Lorre and Greenstreet's performances are, it is Astor who is the true driver of the story, providing a great portrayal of a character that is almost as important as Bogart's Sam Spade when it comes to the success of this film.

There are only a handful of movies that I've watched more than once. "The Maltese Falcon" is one of those. Check it out, and I'm sure you'll see why.






Trivia: "The Maltese Falcon" was the third adaptation of the Hammett novel by the same title. This goes to show that not all remakes are bad. Some are even improvements on the original film. (Although, by all accounts, the 1931 and 1936 versions are pretty good, too, with the 19365 version being a spoof. I haven't seen either of those older movies yet, but both other versions are included in the DVD edition I've linked to above while the Blue-Ray edition only includes the 1936 comedy version, "Satan Met a Lady".)

'Beat the Devil' is quirky fun

Beat the Devil (1954)
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Robert Morley, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lorre, Edward Underdown, and Ivor Barnard
Director: John Huston
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

A down-and-out, formerly wealthy couple (Bogart and Lollobrigida) hook up with a group of international criminals who wish to use their reputation in order to facilitate a scam in British East Africa involving the acquisition of land rich in uranium. They befriend an English couple (Jones and Underdown) who will be traveling with them on the same tramp freighter to Africa, but their new friends aren't quite what they seem.


"Beat the Devil" is a low-key comedy that spoofs the crime dramas so popular in the '40s and '50s and that holds your attention with its fast-moving plot and witty dialogue. The characters featured are all seemingly stock characters from those movies--and the lead actors playing them have done exactly these types of characters in other films--but as the movie progresses, we discover they've all been given slight twists that turn them into mildly comic versions of their stock counterparts. (The exception is Bogart, who remains the straight man throughout, as the other characters have their ludicrous sides exposed and he tries to keep his ticket back to wealth from collapsing.)

Particuarly fun are Morley, who portrays a gullible and inept criminal mastermind; Lorre, who plays an escaped Nazi who now goes by the name of O'Hara, despite his accent marking him as anything but Irish; Barnard, who portrays the homicidal British ex-Army officer who thinks the defeat of Hitler has sent the world into a downward spiral; and Jones, who plays the wide-eyed British subject abroad but whose unending pathelogical lying (and her inability to keep her stories straight or even tell the same lie twice) serves as the catalyst that sows distrust and chaos among the story's characters. And things are all the more hilarious, because everyone is playing their parts straight and taking things as seriously as you'd expect them to in any other crime drama.

With an all-star cast giving fine performances, powered by John Huston's skilled direction and Truman Capote's sharp and witty script, "Beat the Devil" is another one of those classics that is seen too rarely.

If you decide to check this movie out, I want to warn you away from the version released by Passion Productions--it's got an orange cover with black-and-white images of Bogart, Jones, and Lollobrigida on the cover. The dialogue is out of sync for a good portion of the film, and it's very distracting.