The Maltese Falcon (1941) on Netflix
Passed19411h 40mCrimeFilm-NoirMysteryRomance
Sam Spade and Miles Archer run a San Francisco detective agency. A woman calling herself Miss Wonderly hires them to tail Floyd Thursby, and by that night Archer is dead.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.9/10175,485 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes99%
Trailer
Plot summary
Sam Spade and Miles Archer are partners in a San Francisco detective agency. A prospective client calling herself Ruth Wonderly says her younger sister ran off with a man named Floyd Thursby, and Archer takes the assignment. That night officers tell Spade that Archer was shot dead while tailing Thursby, and that Thursby was killed too; Lieutenant Dundy treats Spade as a suspect. The client has left her hotel. She meets Spade again as Brigid O'Shaughnessy, admits her story was invented, and says Thursby was her partner, then asks Spade to look into the killings. Joel Cairo offers Spade money to find a small black bird figurine. When Spade tells O'Shaughnessy that Cairo approached him, she grows nervous.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- George Raft was the first choice to play Sam Spade, but he turned the part down because he did not want to work with a first-time director and had a remake stipulation in his contract. Humphrey Bogart took the role instead.
- A falcon statuette given to actor William Conrad by studio chief Jack L. Warner sold at auction in December 1994 for $398,500, then the highest price ever paid for a film prop. A 45-pound metal falcon from the film fetched over $4 million at auction in 2013.
- Dashiell Hammett based the "Fat Man", Kasper Gutman, on Maundy Gregory, an overweight British detective-entrepreneur who had hunted a long-lost treasure like the jeweled falcon, and based Joel Cairo on a forger Hammett arrested in Pasco, Washington, in 1920.
- For the scene in which Gutman recounts the falcon's history, the camera followed Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart from one room into another and down a long hallway, then boomed up and down and panned to Bogart's drunken face. Script supervisor Meta Wilde said they rehearsed it for two days.
- Struggling to cast Kasper Gutman, John Huston screen-tested Sydney Greenstreet on the suggestion of producer Hal Wallis; Greenstreet, who was 61 and weighed between 280 and 350 pounds, had never appeared on film before.
- John Huston cut every reference to sex that the Hays Office objected to, and when warned not to show excessive drinking he fought back, arguing that Spade drank half a bottle of hard liquor a day and that showing him abstinent would falsify the character.
- John Huston planned his directorial debut so thoroughly that almost no line of dialogue was cut from the final edit, and he shot the entire film in sequence except for some exterior night shots, which helped his actors.
- Geraldine Fitzgerald was offered the part of Brigid O'Shaughnessy but turned it down. Ingrid Bergman, Joan Bennett, Paulette Goddard, Rosalind Russell, Ginger Rogers, Janet Gaynor, Olivia de Havilland and Loretta Young were all considered for the role.
