Film+review

//** The Maltese Falcon  **// ** (1941) **  // The Maltese Falcon  // was shot almost exclusively on sets, which permitted a high degree of control and technique. A montage of San Francisco scenes opens the film, then the bridge again and a reverse zoom that leaves us in the offices of Spade and Archer, who are thus connected to this icon, which remains visible in their windows during most office scenes. The shots of the bridge were an allusion to new bridges in general, specifically the Golden Gate Bridge. Completed only four years before the movie, that famous bridge celebrates a particular kind of technology. Located in California and viewed popularly as part of the New Deal remedy for the Depression. Following Brigid's visit to Spade's office, Huston created a celebrated sequence. A telephone rings in a darkened room and Spade, answering but never visible, hears of his partner's death. His responses seem like a "voice over" (when someone not present explains a scene to the audience), but since he //is// present, the technique suggest that he is somehow absent. The camera remains focussed on the base of the phone, behind which a curtain blows languidly over a window opening on city lights and night sounds. Huston made the technique stand as a metaphor for character. Spade takes a cab to Stockton and Bush Streets, where Archer's body lies at the bottom of a slope. By alternating high angle shots (down on Archer) with low angle shots (Spade looking up to where Archer was shot), Huston establishes the urban equivalent of the Western's box canyon. On three sides buildings rise up, while the far end is enclosed by a hill, trees, and distant buildings. The setting is surprising, initially because of the trees and natural elements, but also because of Spade's unease in nature. Huston shot most of the middle of the movie on beautifully lighted sets that could have served any musical. The scenes between Bogart and Mary Astor (Brigid O'Shaughnessy) employ conventional camera angles and three-point lighting. What is unusual is the number of telephone calls (a dozen) and the tightly framed shots of this object. Telephones not only deliver more information than in the novel, but become transitions to cut from scene to scene. They are used figuratively: because a call is made, something happens. In the movie's final scenes at Spade's apartment, Huston laid great emphasis on Gutman as the symbolic father. Forced to choose either Cairo or Wilmer as fall guy, Gutman tells Spade that he "feels toward Wilmer exactly as if he were my own son." Hammett had elected the homosexual Wilmer as the scapegoat, but Huston cast aside sexuality and even kinship as motivations. Gutman says to Wilmer, "I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But if you lose a son it's possible to get another. There's only one Maltese falcon." His other "son," Cairo, rages at Gutman for being an "imbecile" and "incompetent" when the falcon turns out to be a fake. Our sympathy must rest with Spade, but he is hardly a romantic. He shows the enormous cost of just getting through life with some honesty and integrity. The only problem with the novel as a movie script is the question of Spade's honesty with Brigid. Film scholar David Bordwell points out that Huston abandoned Spade's point-of-view early by showing the death of Miles Archer, but "declines to show the killer (we see only a gloved hand)." The //movie// knows whodunit, suggesting that whatever off-screen force affects him affects us too. It accomplishes this by misdirection. The opening titles that scroll over the falcon suggest that its value is established fact. The movie's statue, coming first, dupes us.