Summary
The film opens with a shot of a falcon in shadows, as the title appears and ominous music plays. An expositional stream of text on the screen tells the story of the “Maltese Falcon,” a golden falcon that was a gift to Charles V from the Knight Templars of Malta in 1539. The Falcon was encrusted with precious jewels, but was taken by pirates on its journey, and its whereabouts remain “a mystery to this day.” As the music becomes more lilting and optimistic, viewers finds themselves in San Francisco, with shots of the Golden Gate Bridge and other landmarks of the city. The camera brings us into the office of a private investigator, Sam Spade—part of a duo “Spade and Archer”—who is rolling himself a cigarette, as his secretary announces that there is a girl in the office to meet with him. The secretary Effie assures him that the woman is a “knockout,” and he invites her to show the customer in. Ruth Wonderly, a well-dressed and poised woman, enters and sits down, telling Sam that she was given his name by her hotel. Ruth tells Sam that she is from New York and that she has traveled to San Francisco to find her sister, whom she believes to be with a man named Floyd Thursby. While Sam lights a cigarette, Ruth admits that she doesn’t know how her sister met Mr. Thursby, and that they are not as close “as sisters ought to be,” but that she feels anxious to retrieve her sister before their parents find out she is missing.
Ruth goes on to explain that the only correspondence she has shared with her sister is a letter that she received from her telling her she was alright, but that she does not have an address for her sister in San Francisco. Having written her a telegram but gotten no word back, Ruth explains, she decided to come to San Francisco herself to find her sister. Ruth explains that she didn’t tell her sister that she was coming, but that she wrote in a letter that she would be at the St. Mark and that Corinne should meet her there. After waiting three days for her sister to arrive, Ruth decided to reach out to a private investigator. Ruth later learned, from going to the post office, that Corinne, her sister, did not retrieve her mail from the post office, but that Floyd Thursby did. Floyd Thursby told Ruth that Corinne didn’t want to see her and that if she didn’t go to the hotel that night to meet Ruth, he would go in her place. Suddenly, Ruth is interrupted by the arrival of Miles Archer, Sam’s assistant, and Sam explains the case. Sam explains that in order to get Ruth’s sister away from Thursby, they will send a man to follow Thursby after he leaves their meeting at the hotel, and that they “have ways” of getting Corinne to come with them, back to the safety of Ruth’s care.
Anxiously, Ruth explains to the investigators that she is afraid of Floyd Thursby, and afraid of what he may have already done to Corinne. When Sam tries to comfort her, she becomes passionate, insisting that Floyd Thursby is a “dangerous man,” and explaining, “I don’t think he’d hesitate to kill Corinne if he thought it would save him.” She then reveals that that Thursby has a wife and children in England. Ruth describes him as having dark hair and thick eyebrows, with a loud voice belying a tendency towards violence, and that the last time she saw him he was wearing a light gray suit and a hat. When she tells the investigators what time she is planning to meet with Thursby that evening, Sam assures her that they will “have a man there,” and Archer tells her that he will be there himself, his eyes wide and staring longingly at Ruth Wonderly. Before leaving, Ruth leaves two large bills on the table, which the two investigators agree will be enough payment. Sam tells her to meet Thursby in the lobby of the hotel, and Archer tells her that she needn’t look for him, because he’ll be watching her. As they say their goodbyes, Sam asks Miles what he thought of her, and Miles says he thought she was “sweet.” Miles then tells Sam that even if Sam saw her first, he spoke first; the scene shifts, the camera zooming in on a sign bearing the two investigators’ names, “Spade & Archer.”
In the next scene, Miles Archer, wearing a dark suit and a fedora, is shot by an unseen man with a revolver, and his body rolls down a hill. The scene changes to a ringing telephone in Sam’s apartment. The curtains in the ominously lit window blow in the breeze as an unseen Sam answers the telephone, and learns of Miles’ murder. As he puts the phone down and turns on a lamp, the camera pulls back to reveal him, with a ponderous expression on his face, before he decides to pick up the phone and call Effie, his secretary, whom he tells of Miles’ death, before telling her to “break the news to Iva,” and telling Effie to “keep her away from me.” Telling Effie she is an angel, he hangs up the phone.
The scene shifts and we see Sam getting out of a car and walking towards the scene of the crime. When he is stopped by a policeman, he tells the officer who he is and is let back to look at Miles’ body. At the bottom of the hill, Miles’ dead body is photographed. A man named Tom climbs the hill and greets Sam, explaining that Miles was shot by an English gun, unwrapping a Webley revolver. Sam instantly recognizes the gun as a .45 automatic and notes that they don’t make them anymore. Sam considers how the murder must have taken place, with Miles’ back to the hill and the fence in front of it, and the murderer facing the hill. Tom tells Sam that a police officer found the body, and Sam asks if anyone heard the gunshot, to which Tom replies that someone must have, but the police only just got there. Sam forgoes Tom’s offer to let him look at the body before it is taken away and Tom tells him that Miles’ gun was never fired, before asking if Miles was working at the time he was shot. Hesitating at first, Sam eventually reveals that Miles was chasing a man named Thursby, but when Tom presses him for more details, he touches Tom’s chest insisting, “Don’t crowd me Tom,” and then goes to leave.
Sam calls Ruth Wonderly from a nearby payphone. When he calls, he is surprised to discover that she has checked out of the hotel. After asking for her forwarding address, he hangs up and leaves. Back in his dimly lit apartment, Sam removes his jacket and hat and sits down on his bed, just as the doorbell buzzes. Sam answers the door to find Tom and another man there, and invites them in. They enter silently and do not sit down immediately, even after Sam invites them to several times. When they finally do sit down, Tom asks how Miles’ wife took the news of his murder, but Sam simply says, “I don’t know anything about women.” The other man then asks what kind of gun Sam carries, to which he responds that he doesn’t like guns, but there are a few at his office. When the men ask if he has a gun in his apartment, Sam denies it and tells them to search the apartment themselves, “If they have a search warrant.” He then becomes agitated at their evening interruption, urging them to tell him their business or leave. Tom calmly tells Sam that he has no right to speak so aggressively towards them and asks why he was “tailing Thursby.” When Sam tells them that Miles was the one tailing him, that it was for a client and that he cannot disclose why, they press him, Tom insisting that they will not be able to figure anything out without his assistance. The man with Tom, Lieutenant Dundy, is suspicious of Sam, saying that he rushed away from the scene of the crime without even looking at the body of his partner, and that he knows that in fact Effie the secretary, not Sam, had delivered the bad news to Archer’s widow. Dundy tells Sam that he’ll give him ten minutes to get in touch with Ruth, and sort things out, and when Sam asks Tom what his “boyfriend” means, Dundy reveals that Thursby was killed half an hour after Sam left the crime scene.
Dundy continues to press Sam, asking him where he was before coming home. When Sam tells him he was walking around to think things over, Dundy becomes all the more suspicious. Sam insists that he was simply walking up Bush Street before coming home, and eventually stands anxiously, admitting that he feels on edge and nervous about the men’s suspicion, on top of which he is dealing with the death of his partner. Sarcastically, Sam asks Tom and Dundy more specifics about Thursby’s death: “How’d I kill him? I forget.” Tom informs Sam that Thursby was shot in the back four times with a .44 or .45 from across the street, with no witnesses. Tom then tells him that no one from the hotel knows anything about Thursby other than he lived alone at the hotel for a week. The men admit that they know nothing about Thursby and were hoping that Sam would know more, but Sam tells them that he doesn’t know anything about him. Dundy then threatens Sam with a square deal—if he did kill Thursby, Dundy wouldn’t blame him, but “that wouldn’t stop me from nailing you.” Sam then offers them both drinks, and ironically toasts, “Success to crime.”
We cut to the cover of a newspaper reporting on the murders of Archer and Thursby, which states that the murders were linked. In the next shot, as Sam enters his office, Effie informs him that Iva Archer is in there, and when Sam protests, she tells him that she didn’t know how to keep her away. Sam goes in to greet Iva, and as he closes the door behind him, Iva tearfully falls into his arms and they kiss, revealing to the viewer that they have had an affair. Still in an embrace, Iva asks if Sam killed Miles, suggesting that he did so to be closer to her. Laughing and slapping his hands together mockingly, Sam sits on his desk and mimics Iva’s words back to her as she cries, upset that she too would accuse him of murder. When Iva cries more, he regrets his behavior and touches her shoulder tenderly, and tells her she shouldn’t have come to his office, but rather stayed home to grieve. When she asks if he’ll come to her soon, Sam tells Iva he will come as soon as he can, before sending her on her way.
After Iva goes, Sam looks at his partner’s empty desk, but Effie soon comes in and asks how his meeting with Iva went. Sam tells Effie that Iva thinks he shot Miles, while the police think he shot Thursby, and ironically asks her who she thinks he shot. Effie asks if he plans to marry Iva, but Sam insists that he wishes he never met her. When Effie asks if Iva could have killed Miles, Sam laughs and calls her a “nice, rattle-brained little angel.” Unamused, Effie tells Sam that Iva hadn’t been home for long—her clothes were thrown onto a chair and her bed was artificially messed up to make it look like she had been sleeping— when Effie arrived at her house at 3AM to break the news about Miles’ death. After Effie lights Sam’s cigarette, Sam grants that she's a detective, but says that he doesn’t think Iva killed Miles. Worried, Effie asks if the police actually think he killed Thursby and tells him he’s “too slick” for his own good, as the telephone in the office rings. Effie picks up the phone and it is Ruth Wonderly on the line, who tells Sam to meet her at the Coronet apartments and to call on “Ms. LeBlanc.” As he gets up to go, Sam coldly tells Effie to remove Miles’ desk and take down the signs that say Archer on them, setting fire to the piece of paper on which he wrote the address.
Arriving at the apartment where Ruth is staying, he finds Ruth in a robe. She confesses that she had lied to him the previous day. Sam assures her that he never really believed her and asks for her real name, which she tells him is Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Sam tells her that they didn’t believe her story—rather they believed her $200. When Brigid asks if she is to blame for the deaths of Archer and Thursby, Sam tells her she is not, and as she begins to mourn Miles’ loss, Sam tells her to stop it, assuring her that private investigators risk their lives all the time, and disparaging Miles, alluding to his having no children and a wife that didn’t like him. When Sam rises from his seat, he tells her there are a number of policemen on the case, and Brigid becomes anxious, asking if the police know about her, and begging him not to embroil her in the legalities of the murders. He agrees, but on the condition that she tell him what’s going on. Brigid tells Sam that she cannot tell him yet, but that he must trust her, becoming more and more anxious, insisting that she has no one whom she can trust, and begging him to help her. Sam only mocks her performance, telling her that she doesn’t need his help because she is so good at playing the victim. “I deserve that,” Brigid replies, but insists that she only lied in the ways she gave him information, not in the information itself.
Sam smiles at her and tells her that in order for him to help her, he needs to know more about the situation, and Thursby. Brigid tells him that she met him in “the Orient” and that they traveled to San Francisco from Hong Kong last week. Thursby took advantage of her dependence on him, Brigid says, and eventually wanted to betray her. When she reveals that she believes him to have killed Archer, Sam tells her that Thursby had a Luger—a type of gun—in his shoulder holster, and that Archer wasn’t killed with a Luger. Brigid then asks Sam if he suspects her of killing Archer, and he asks if she did, but she denies it and tells Sam that Thursby always carried an extra revolver, and that he had first gone to the Orient as a bodyguard to a gambler, and was always a gun devotee, and always was heavily armed. Apparently the gambler disappeared overseas, but Brigid says she doesn’t know the details, but that Thursby was highly defensive, lining his bed with crumpled newspapers so he would hear attackers. When Sam makes fun of her for having associated with such a violent man, Brigid insists that she’s in as bad a spot as one can be in. When Sam asks if she’s in physical danger, she tells him, “I’m not heroic. I don’t think there’s anything worse than death.”
After Brigid insists that she will be killed unless Sam helps her, he asks her who killed Thursby—her enemies or his—and she guesses it was his, but purports not to know. Frustrated by the ambiguity of Brigid’s requests, Sam gets up to leave, and when she begs him not to tell the police, he tells her he must, which she accepts, saying mournfully, “I’ll have to take my chances.” Sensing another angle, Sam asks Brigid how much money she has, and tells her to hand over her remaining $500. As she goes to get the money, Sam examines the inside of a hat in her apartment, which is from a shop in Hong Kong. As Brigid hands him the money, he notices she only gave him 400, and she insists she needs some to live on. Sam tells her she’ll need to sell her valuable belongings for money, and she hesitantly hands over the cash. As he leaves he tells her he’ll be back to the apartment as soon as he can with good news, will ring four times to announce his arrival, and let himself in with a key. Sam leaves as the camera zeroes in on Brigid’s concerned face.
Analysis
The start of the film situates the viewer squarely within the conventions of the genre of film noir. The picturesque city of San Francisco is the setting, but in the genre of noir, things that look nice on the surface are always hiding an inner darkness. Indeed there must be someone to keep such an idyll safe, and it is not long until we meet Sam Spade, the man charged with cleaning up the city’s seedy underbelly. In noir, a “seedy underbelly” is never far away, and it is up to strong and capable men to fix it. Sam Spade, first shown rolling up a cigarette, is played by Humphrey Bogart, a serious-faced icon of the noir genre. With a permanent look of concern plastered onto his manly face, Bogart is the epitome of rugged style, just the man for the job. Bogart’s performance style portrays a man who is imperturbable, completely cool and centered when the going gets tough. The noir often panders towards gender stereotypes, and Sam Spade is a prototypically crusty hero, a lonely man searching for a crime to solve and a pretty woman to look at.
The events of the film are mobilized by the arrival of just that kind of pretty woman. In noir, women are a sight for sore eyes, but they are also never what they seem. Ruth Wonderly is a characteristically complex person, both attractive and mysterious. Indeed, even before she has entered the office, the arrival of Ruth Wonderly creates a stir, even catching the attention of Spade’s female assistant, who insists that Sam would want to see Ms. Wonderly even if she wasn’t a customer. Throughout, Spade shares with Effie a kind of conspiracy, and it is as though Effie is an extension of both his libido and his job as a private investigator, an extra pair of eyes to suss out beautiful women as well as threats. When Ruth arrives, she is a beautiful and fragile woman, upset about the disappearance of her sister. She speaks quickly and fearfully, practically begging the strong and crafty detectives to help her retrieve her sister, thus becoming a perfect female specimen of distress upon which the more beguiled Miles Archer can project his desire to protect. When she leaves, Miles Archer uses only one adjective to describe her: “sweet,” but Sam does not fall so easily for her spell, maintaining a suspicious attitude towards her evidently wholesome demeanor.
In the world of noir, men and women are entirely different species. The male gaze is a prevalent lens throughout the beginning of the film. There is a correlation between protection and voyeurism in the world of the noir. Indeed, not only Wonderly’s beauty, but the inevitably that Sam Spade will want to “see” it, precede her entrance. Ruth’s beauty makes her an eligible candidate for protection, in addition, of course, to the large sum she puts on the table. In The Maltese Falcon, looking at someone and looking after them are the same. When Spade assures Ruth that they’ll have one of their men watching after her at the hotel that night, Miles Archer volunteers himself, his expression showing something between wide-eyed wonder and lust, as he stares at Ruth. The chance to protect Ruth is also the chance to look at her. Soon after, Archer assures her that she needn’t worry about finding him in the hotel that night, because he’ll be watching. Here, we see that his gaze is of the utmost importance to the job itself, and that it is unimportant whether she sees him. The female gaze is not of particular value. As she leaves, Ruth seems unsure and slightly ill at ease in the presence of Archer’s eager eye contact and handshake. Archer positions himself as a voyeur and a protector all at once, making for an unsettling combination.
Death is never far behind, as in the next scene we see Miles shot in the chest by an unseen murderer. It is as though his lecherous eagerness to watch Ruth cannot go unpunished for long. Indeed, Miles’ murder is marked as a moral event when Tom says to Sam at the crime scene, “Miles had his faults, like any of the rest of us, but I guess he must’ve had some good points too.” Sam looks at Miles’ body mysteriously, before ambivalently saying, “I guess so,” and walking away. Miles’ death is perceived not as an accident, but as a reflection or extension of his character, and the viewer gets the sense that in the sordid crime-addled world of film noir, death always takes on a moral quality, rendering its victims either martyrs or punished sinners. Sam seems largely unaffected by Miles’ death, only showing emotion when he is shirking the responsibility of informing Miles’ wife, which he outsources to his secretary. Sam must continue on alone, and stay smarter than his distractible partner.
Indeed, Sam is much less taken in by Ruth’s antics than was Miles, and maintains a cool-headed indifference to the women in his life, even if he still falls prey to their beauty on occasion. While Miles is dumbfounded by Ruth, pushed into an unprofessional infatuation right in front of her, Sam is skeptical of her story, but takes on her case for the money. Later, after Miles’ death, Sam remains skeptical. When Ruth—now Brigid—asks Sam to “shield” her from the police, Sam does not simply bow down to her desire to be protected, but presses her for answers, and mocks what he views as her performance of agitation and anxiety, and becomes frustrated with her lack of specifics. It is not enough just to protect a woman for protection’s sake: he needs to know the stakes, or the paycheck. In Sam’s eyes, a woman is guilty until proven innocent, and perhaps not even then. While he maintains an affectionate rapport with his secretary Effie, he does not respect her enough to consider her his equal, even when she gives him information. Furthermore, his attitude towards Iva, with whom he had an affair, is dismissive bordering on contemptuous. Sam’s attitude towards women can be summed up in his statement when he is being questioned by the police about telling Iva of Miles’ death, and he tells the men that he doesn’t understand women at all, throwing up his hands in the closest that Humphrey Bogart can come to exasperation.
The use of setting to create mood and atmosphere is notable in the noir genre, and The Maltese Falcon exemplifies this trope. When Miles Archer is shot, his black suit and fedora blend in to his pitch black surroundings, before he falls back, consumed by darkness. The darkness of the setting reflects its immorality and bleakness. Death is not far off in the noir, and danger lurks in the shadows, threatening to consume anyone who wanders too far from the light. When Sam gets the call telling him that Miles is dead, we do not see him at first, only the curtains in his window as they blow gently in the breeze from outside. Just the image of the open window suggests the threat of intrusion, the promise of a break-in, and the audience stares at the window, unable to see Sam, left to think about all the dangers yet to come. When he turns on the light, Sam sits in a stark contrast of whites and blacks, pondering his next move, and mystified by the fate of his partner. His apartment itself reflects the visual starkness and eeriness of noir; the furnishings are spartan, with hardly any decoration, just a bed, a phone, and curtains, which relentlessly blow in the breeze. Shadows precede figures and mysterious breezes rustle fabrics in the world of The Maltese Falcon, lending it its unique stylized visual language of suspense.
