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Mystery, Crime, Thriller 100 min PG
Rotten Tomatoes99%Metacritic97IMDb
He's a Killer When He Hates!
A private detective takes on a case that involves him with three eccentric criminals, a beautiful liar, and their quest for a priceless statuette.
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Cool, meticulous, plot-driven and spare.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
Recently re-released in glorious 4K (nope, I couldn't tell the difference, either) but, hey - any excuse to see this wonderful crime noir on a big screen again is OK with me. When "Brigid" (Mary Astor) approaches PI "Sam Spade" (Humphrey Bogart) and his partner "Archer" (Jerome Cowan) with a dodgy sounding story about her sister being kidnapped by her older lover, they don't believe a word of it - but $200 (and a bit of a shine to the lady from "Archer") gets them to go through the motions. Well: they were right about one thing - her story was riddled with holes, but not so many as "Archer" becomes, and soon "Spade" and the police are trying to track down/avoid the murderer whilst trying to establish some sort of motive. Enter the stars of the film, for me, anyway - the uber-sleazy "Joel Cairo" (Peter Lorre) and "Gutman" (Sydney Greenstreet), the avuncular gentleman who has most of the pieces of the puzzle and who is as dangerous and devious as he is charming and disarming... Will "Spade" get to the bottom of the mystery before he ends up brown bread? That's where the film falls down a bit - there is precious little jeopardy to the plot; indeed the last fifteen or twenty minutes ar
Read the whole review on TMDBThis is a pretty good movie that ages fairly well, but I do not feel compelled to pour superlatives down over as most reviews do, both critics and regular viewers. The actors look like they are having fun with it and this classic movie is worth watching just because of that. The dialogue, which I like to think is a specialty in my own otherwise unremarkable novels, is excellent. I had trouble with how blasé Sam Spade seems to be with the bad news he received near the beginning, and how he reacted to it. (He redeemed himself a bit at the end in a passionate little speech about partners). And all the patter about love between Sam Spade and Miss O’Shaughnessey seemed silly to me, as there was never any sign they were connecting and getting closer: never mind they were also plotting each other’s downfall. Personally, Sam, I think your own assistant Effie was cuter, sweeter and a better catch. But the movie is fun to watch and the mystery solving ending by Mr. Spade is top-notch stuff. The supporting cast is fine. See if you can pick out the guy who played Bert the cabdriver in Its A Wonderful Life (“My mouth’s bleeding, Bert! My mouth’s bleeding!”). And if you look closely, you can see
Read the whole review on TMDBThe cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter. Sam Spade is a tough private detective who gets involved in a murderous hunt for The Maltese Falcon, a legendary statuette thought to contain diamonds. What can I possibly say about this version of The Maltese Falcon that hasn't been said, written and studied by the greatest film critics and industry members before? Well nothing by way of new stuff or a differing slant on the plot, I can merely concur and hopefully jolt prospective first time viewers into believing the reputation afforded this stunning piece of cinema. First off I have to let it be known that this is far from being my favourite Bogart movie, in fact it's not even my favourite Bogart movie from 1941!, it's well trumped in my affections by "High Sierra", but few films ever get as close to being perfect as "The Maltese Falcon" clearly is. The source from Dashiell Hammett is first rate, and yet it took someone like John Huston (director and screenwriter) to bring it triumphantly together. It had been adapted for the screen twice before with less than favourable results, but Huston, working tightly from Hammett's dialogue driven astuteness, crafts a claustrophobic, shadowy
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If you loved this film, the television, the book, the music, the game.
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