Summary
Sam enters his office as a painter is changing the name of the business to reflect the recent death of Miles Archer. Seeing Effie, Sam asks if there is any news and if she sent the flowers, before calling her invaluable and asking her to get his lawyer on the phone. Sitting at his desk, Sam starts to roll a cigarette, but is interrupted by the buzzing of his phone. It is his lawyer, who he refers to as Sid, and who he informs that he will have to “tell the coroner to go to blazes,” meaning tell him to go away. Sam asks his lawyer if he has any leverage, and bemoans the fact that Dundy is so suspicious of him. As Sam asks his lawyer what it will cost for him to stay safe and wraps up the phone conversation, Effie enters with a business card, holding it up to him for him to smell. As he smells it, she tells him it smells like gardenia, and Sam tells her to bring him in. The man with the gardenia-scented business card is Mr. Cairo. Cairo offers his condolences for the death of Archer, and asks if there is indeed a connection between the deaths of Archer and Thursby, as he mysteriously examines his own cane. Smoking his cigarette, Sam looks at Cairo stone-faced, as Cairo confesses that he is looking for an “ornament,” a black statuette of a bird, the “Maltese Falcon” of the title.
For his help, Cairo offers to pay Sam $5000, a sum which both impresses Sam and makes him skeptical. The phone buzzes and it is Effie, who is going home for the evening. As Sam puts down the phone, he turns to find Cairo pointing a gun at him and ordering him to put his hands behind his head. Telling Sam that he intends to search his office, Cairo threatens that if Sam tries to stop him he will shoot him. Sam consents to let him search the room, and is about to let Cairo check his person for a weapon, but Sam swings around and pushes the gun out of Cairo’s hand, before backing him up and punching him unconscious onto the couch. Taking Cairo’s possessions out of his pocket, Sam comes across several passports. Examining Cairo’s wallet, he finds a theater ticket and puts it on the table, as well as some money, before finally pulling out a handkerchief and smelling it. Presumably, it too smells like gardenia, and Sam eyes it suspiciously.
As Cairo begins to awaken, Sam picks up his gun off the floor and watches Cairo, who looks in a nearby mirror and complains that Sam ruined his shirt. Apologizing, Sam tells Cairo that he knows the $5000 offer was “just hooey,” having examined his wallet. Cairo insists that he will pay $5000 for the return of the figure and asks if Sam has the figure, which Sam tells him he does not. Cairo protests, asking why Sam would risk getting injured trying to prevent him from searching if he does not have the statue. Sam tells him to search but he will not let him do it at gunpoint, and Cairo tries to level with him that he had to do it, because the item is so valuable. When Sam asks for Cairo to make his aim clear, Cairo tells him that he cannot, but he can offer him the $5000 as promised. Seeing that Sam requires a retainer—an assurance that Cairo will pay him the full price—Cairo offers him $100, but Sam will only settle for 200. Sam continues to question Cairo, asking why he came to see him. Cairo tells Sam that he believes Sam to know where the statuette is, or at least how to get it. Sam plays along so long as he doesn’t have to do anything unlawful, and Cairo tells him that he can find him at a hotel nearby, and gives him the room number. Collecting his things, Cairo asks for his gun back, and Sam gives it to him. Immediately Cairo aims the gun at Sam again and searches his office, as Sam laughs in disbelief at Cairo’s tactics.
Sam walks down a busy city street, passing a man in a trench coat who follows him from a short distance. Sam manages to get ahead of him, and hide in the entrance of a theater as the man passes by, before getting in a cab. The man gets in the cab behind him. In his cab, Sam notices that they are being followed and instructs the driver to turn and go up a hill to elude the following cab. Once at his destination, Sam buzzes and is let into a building just as the man in the trench coat arrives. Sam goes through the building and out the other side, losing his pursuer. We then see Sam arriving at Brigid’s apartment, and as he takes off his coat, she asks whether he has kept the police off her trail. She asks him if he will get in any trouble, to which he responds, “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.” As they sit down, Sam slyly suggests that Brigid is pretending to be someone she is not—“the schoolgirl manner”—and she tells him that she hasn’t lived a good life and that she has been bad.
Sam leans back and encourages Brigid to drop the innocent act, to which she agrees, before he mentions that he saw Joel Cairo that evening. Brigid wears an enigmatic expression before asking if Sam knows him. When he tells her, “Only slightly,” she rises and anxiously stokes the fire in the fireplace. As Brigid gets a cigarette, Sam chuckles at her innocent performance. “What did he say…about me?” Brigid asks Sam, but Sam says that they did not talk about her, but that Cairo offered him $5000 to find the Maltese Falcon. When Brigid asks him if he is going to take Cairo’s offer, Sam simply says that $5000 is a lot of money. Brigid responds, “It’s more than I can offer you if I have to bid for your loyalty,” which upsets Sam, who insists that Brigid has given him no confidence, just offered him money. When she asks him what she can offer him besides money, he kisses her abruptly as the music swells. He breaks away soon enough, however, and tells her that the only way she can buy his confidence is if she bestows him with more confidence, and convinces him that she is worth trusting. Brigid implores him to be more patient, and trust her a little bit longer, telling Sam that she needs to talk to Joel Cairo. Sam tells her she can see him that night, and uses the phone to leave a message at the hotel where Joel is staying. When Brigid tells him she is too afraid to invite Joel to her apartment, Sam agrees to invite him to his place instead.
Getting out of a cab, Sam and Brigid walk up to his apartment, as Iva watches jealously from a nearby car. Inside, as Sam opens his apartment door, Brigid assures him that she would never put herself in this position if she didn’t trust him, but he deflects her assurance brusquely. He tells her, “You don’t have to trust me, so long as you can persuade me to trust you.” As Sam turns on the lights, Brigid requests that he let her interact with Cairo in her own way, to which he agrees. Sam notices the man in the trench coat loitering outside his apartment, presumably there to spy on him. The door buzzes, and it is Cairo, who informs Sam of the “boy outside, [who] seems to be watching the house.” Hearing this, Brigid becomes upset, asking who it is, and Sam tells her that the boy has been following him all day, assuring her that he “shook him long before” he went to her apartment.
Cairo comes into the apartment, saying that he is delighted to see Brigid. “I am sure you would be, Joel,” she answers, and they both sit down. Brigid tells him she heard about his offer for the Falcon and asks him if he has the money ready, and when he says he does, she asks if it’s in cash. With a newly imperious and skeptical tone, Brigid asks if Mr. Cairo is ready to turn over $5000 in cash in exchange for the Falcon. Backpedaling, Mr. Cairo clarifies that he did not mean he has the money ready currently, but that he is ready to procure it when the time comes, “during banking hours.” When he offers to hand over the money at 10:30 the next morning, Brigid tells him she doesn’t have the Falcon, but can have it in another week. Cairo asks where it is, and she tells him it’s “where Floyd hid it.” Cairo continues to question her calmly, lighting a cigarette and asking why—if she knows where it is—they have to wait another week, and why she is willing to sell it. Nervously Brigid tells him she is afraid to touch it after the murder of Floyd and she wants to get it off her hands. Cairo asks what happened to Floyd, and Brigid simply says, “The fat man.” This causes a stir in Cairo, who asks if the “fat man” is there, and when Brigid asks what difference it makes, he nervously says that it makes a difference that the man in the trench coat—rather, the boy—is spying on them from outside. When Brigid obliquely alludes to the “boy in Istanbul,” implying that Cairo seduced a boy to get out of trouble, Cairo begins to fire back at her tauntingly, and Brigid slaps him. Sam intervenes and pushes Cairo as Cairo reaches for his gun, saying, “When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.”
There is a knock at the door, and Sam goes to answer it, only to find Tom and Dundy waiting there. When Sam tells them they cannot come in, they try to coerce him into letting them in, but Sam stays firm. Dundy threatens that he will stop Sam soon enough, and that he has heard rumors of Sam’s affair with Iva. Sam denies it, and Dundy continues that the rumors are that Iva tried to divorce Miles to marry Sam, but Miles wouldn’t let her. Again Sam denies it, and tells Dundy that his original accusation that he killed Thursby will inevitably be undone by an accusation that he killed Miles Archer as well. The men continue to argue, and Dundy calls Sam a liar for denying his affair with Iva. When Sam asks if that’s what led them to barge into his house so early in the morning, Dundy simply orders Sam to let them in, but Sam shakes his head. Dundy begins to believe him and he and Tom agree to leave, but the men are interrupted by the yells of Cairo and the sounds of a struggle inside the apartment.
Entering the apartment, the policemen find Cairo with a wound on his face, which he blames Brigid for. She tells the policemen that she had to do it, because he started attacking her and she couldn’t bring herself to shoot him. Cairo calls her a liar and tries to tell his story to the policemen, that Sam left them in the room with a pistol and they got in a scuffle, and she struck him with the pistol. Brigid goes to kick him and the cops hold her back, pushing her into the chair. Sam then calmly introduces Brigid as one of his employees, and Cairo as an acquaintance of Thursby, telling the story of Cairo’s request for help procuring the Maltese Falcon, and saying that Cairo had pulled a gun on him. Sam then tells them that he and Brigid were trying to figure out how much Cairo knows about the killings, and brought him up to Sam’s apartment for questioning. When Dundy asks if Cairo wants to press charges for the violence done to him, Cairo hesitates, and Sam assures him that if Cairo puts out a complaint, so will he and then they’ll all be in the charge of the police. As Dundy tells them to gather their things to go down to the station, Sam weaves another tale, that the whole scene was an act, which the police start to believe. When Dundy tries again to arrest them all for having the gun, Sam tells them the gun was a plant, and Dundy hits him in the chest. Tom holds Sam back from fighting, and Dundy takes their names and addresses, Sam telling them that Brigid’s address is his office. Cairo leaves, and Sam asks Tom to tell Cairo to leave the gun. The police leave, and Tom tells Sam, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Analysis
Having given Brigid a good talking-to and collected $500, Sam is back as his cool-headed, hard-nosed self, checking in with his loyal secretary and calmly rolling himself a cigarette before he is interrupted yet again by an unexpected event. A great deal of the movie consists of Sam getting interrupted while rolling a cigarette, and this image is an apt symbol of his near-constant state; he is always addled by the demands and dramas of others, never able to bask in his own solitude and just have a smoke. While Sam wants to help other people, he also never wants to get too involved, maintaining a chilly detachment from his work and from the people who need help. Sam is determined to take care of himself, to maintain his independence, and do what’s best, but only for the right price.
The outsider who barges in to Sam’s life is Mr. Cairo, an eccentric character with a cane, an unusual accent, and a gardenia-scented business card. Played expertly by the character actor Peter Lorre, Cairo is established immediately as an exotic figure, his floral scents and melodic voice suggesting a sexual ambiguity and his indeterminate accent pinning him as a man from elsewhere. In contrast to Sam’s solid, macho, and straightforward comportment, Cairo is portrayed as bendy, untrustworthy, with an almost dissonant temperament—he could turn from sweet to sadistic in the blink of an eye. Cairo can barely maintain eye contact, and addresses Sam with a slippery and unreliable tone that belies his villainousness. Film noir imbues its foreigners, sexual deviants, and other types of misfits with an untrustworthy quality. In film noir, the heroes are strong and uptight, while the villains are made crooked by their own vices, exoticisms, and perversities. Everyone is untrustworthy in a noir, but the villains are the most unpredictable. Indeed, Mr. Cairo is played as the definition of unsavory, sickly-sweet charmer at first, before threateningly unsheathing a gun when things don’t go his way.
Cairo is a slippery villain, but his simpering act is no match for Sam’s confident and strong hand. The ambiguously sexual touch of Cairo is enough to drive Sam to swiftly maneuver the gun out of his grasp and gain the upper hand. Indeed, Sam manages this while still coolly puffing on a cigarette. Knocking the gun to the floor, Sam smirks, cigarette hanging out of his mouth as he backs Cairo up before punching him in the face and knocking him out. Cairo may be dangerous, but his squirreliness is deflected by Sam’s brute strength and detached reserve. When Cairo does manage to get the upper hand, immediately pointing his gun at Sam after he is given it back, Sam laughs at him mockingly, not believing how unsavory Cairo really is.
Sam is a unique protagonist, and emblematic of the noir anti-hero in that he is alone, without any real allies, and working outside the law. Believing him to have killed his partner, the policemen in his neighborhood keep a watchful eye over him and do not trust him, and he must work to try to evade their gaze. Working only for himself, Sam is concerned with getting paid and doing the job in the best and cleanest way possible. In Sam’s world, the world of the private investigator, his aims are never criminal, but sometimes they are in direct opposition to the law enforcers with whom he works. A true maverick, Sam is an anti-hero because he is so solitary, and in many ways he is incompatible with any potential collaborators. Rather than grieve the loss of his partner, Sam immediately has his desk taken away. Rather than agree to help Brigid when she bemoans her feelings of aloneness, Sam finagles a deal. Sam is the quintessential noir dark horse, fated to swim upstream, to keep his own company, and to do the job himself.
It is in this section of the film that Sam reveals a weakness for the opposite sex, as he kisses Brigid abruptly at her apartment. Up until now, he has exhibited nothing but indifference towards her, but when she expresses distaste for the bidding war that she must engage in with Joel Cairo for Sam’s loyalty, and asks what she can buy his services with if not money, he shows her the key to his cooperation: sex. While the moment is not exactly romantic—his proof of affection for her comes out of a discussion of their business relationship—he has an unwavering confidence in his display of affection towards her, and he reveals for perhaps the first time his vulnerabilities and fears. As he pulls away from the kiss, he expresses his dire need for “confidence.” “Confidence”—more details about her story and who she is, insurance that she isn’t just “fiddling around hoping it’ll all turn out right in the end”—becomes a euphemism for Sam’s desire for romantic intimacy, as well as professional assurance. Living so much of his life in doubt and mystery, going it alone, Sam longs for a relationship with a woman on whom he can depend. As he clumsily conflates their business relationship with his desire to know Brigid romantically, Sam’s voice quivers and he appears before her as a fragile and lonely man, looking for respite in the arms of a woman he can trust. Romantic assurance is the only force that can pull the loner Sam Spade out of his businessman’s tendency to sell to the highest bidder.
