The Maltese Falcon in Novel

The Maltese Falcon in Novel and Film Some critics and cinema historians regard John Huston's directorial debut as the very first work of the film noir genre. His 1941 classic, The Maltese Falcon, was not only the inflection point in the career of the genre's most celebrated leading man in Humphrey Bogart but was also one of the first American films to deal so unromantically and irredeemably with the themes contained therein. The Maltese Falcon is the much sought over, and often killed for, statuette. It is of illustrious and royal history, encrusted with invaluable jewels, shrouded in black enamel and evidently impossible to obtain. Though the film initiates on false premises of kidnapping and ambush, it eventually becomes apparent that this bird is actual the driving force for all of the film's actors. There is something crucial to this element, which originates from the Dashiell Hammett novel. The bird plays a central role in reflecting both the struggles of individual characters and the vices facing the larger world that served as a setting for the film and its respective history. What is perhaps most remarkable about this work is that the oft- adapted novel which inspired it was, upon its composition in 1930, not remarkably different from the film. The typical apprehension over the loyalties of an adaptation are absent here, as the bleak and aggressive nature of the novel remains intact. If there is a significant difference, it may only be in the degree to which Spade's emotional distance is subject to exploration, with the novel allowing certain sequences to diminish any glamorization of the man. Symbolically, both film and novel show that Sam Spade has what evolves into perhaps the strangest and most emotionally detached relationship with the titular statuette. At the film's start, he is completely ignorant of the existence of this falcon. The noir genre draws, as a primary influence, the gothic overtones of medieval and classical literature. The falcon statue, shrouded in black as it is, invokes an inescapable association with the black carrion or gore-crow of literary yore, commonly implying the shadow of doom. It is this representation of ill fortune which the bird seems to bring to Sam Spade. But as the film progresses, and a greater palette of colors in his character becomes available to the audience, Spade is revealed to be a man of questionable ethic. His affair with his partner's wife and his cowardly impulse to dispatch his secretary to inform her of her husband's death, along with a variety of decisions that reflect a serious moral ambivalence, illuminate a man with a black bird over his shoulder at all times. And indeed, as the presence of the falcon comes to play a greater role in the driving action of the film, which is often conveyed in bursts of violence and murder, so too does Sam Spade's misfortune. His entanglements with law enforcement, gangland thugs and a murderous seductress, though perhaps karmic to some extent, seem inextricably to wind their way to Spade's doorstep under the supervision of the harbinger bird. A key distinction between the film and the novel comes less from what might be regarded as a narrative decision than a practical one. The ending to the novel draws out somewhat longer, as a matter or feasibility one might deduce. However, it allows Hammett the opportunity to reflect on the response of the characters around him to this aspect of Spade. The famous closing line of the film which identifies that statuette ambiguously as 'the stuff that dreams are made of' projects something of a distinct impulse from his earlier detachments. This contrasts the end to the novel, where Spade's secretary voices revulsion at his moral detachment (in light of a treatment of O'Shaughnessey which is consistent through novel and film) and where Spade and Archer's widow are joined. This is a powerful moment of the novel which leads to far more insidious speculation about Spade's motives, withdrawing us from any certainty as to his moral posture.