A Film Canon

The first fully-fledged noir, The Maltese Falcon construes its narrative as a web of flexible, provisional arrangements, their object - the eponymous, blank-eyed statuette - relegated to an opaque distance that is just reinforced by the endless quest for clarification. Hence Huston's taste for images that exude an irreducible blankness; a series of empty lots. Concomitantly, character is construed as so many performances, including private eye Sam Spade's (Humphrey Bogart) taste for "very smooth explanations", femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy's (Mary Astor) seemingly limitless capacity for duplicity, and Kasper 'Fat Man' Guttman's (Sydney Greenstreet) threatening politeness, all of which call the very distinction between truth and falsehood into question, as evinced in O'Shaughnessy's lament (itself a lie): "I'm so tired, tired of lying, making up lies, not knowing what is a lie and what is the truth." In such a world, the closest approximation to sincerity comes with Spade's constant references to this performance, offered in a cynical, tongue-in-cheek register that speaks to his own participation in it, and is encapsulated in his brittle laugh, which seems to emerge from the most unlikely situations with a mind of its own. That this disruption of narrative and character reflects a broader social malaise is suggested by the extent to which Spade's approach guarantees him virtually all the masculinity in the film, his wise-cracking leaving four emasculated voices in its wake - two female, one English, one homosexual - and exuding a charismatic misogyny that speaks to a proportionately destabilising mileu; or, alternatively, to the fact that 1930s San Francisco has recognised itself to be as contingent, or fleeting, as the panorama of other times and places at which the falcon has made its coveted appearance. This may explain the pervasive sense of alienation, encapsulated in cinematographer Arthur Edeson's use of unusual camera angles and long takes to suggest that the city has become little more than a labyrinth of low- ceilinged apartments and narrow, barely-lit streets; an endless corridor, leading nowhere.