The Maltese Falcon Film Noir

Though there has been much controversy surrounding film noir’s status as a genre, its role as an influential artistic movement in cinema is undeniable. Even some of film noir’s most vocal critics have conceded that it "was an essential part of the 1940s outlook, a cinematic style forged in the fires of war, exile, and disillusion, a melodramatic reflection for a world gone mad” (House 65). Just as the United States had entered into battle with the allied powers, noir arose as an insurgent challenging the classic Hollywood tropes of filmmaking and offering a more sinister glimpse into American society. In order to fully understand the impact of film noir, it is vital to analyze the historical framework from which it arose, especially the heightened

This meant that the villains were always captured and justice was wrought, or in the case of Angels with Dirty Faces, Cagney’s character was made into a tragic hero condemning a life of depravity. On the other of the spectrum, hopelessness prevailed during the era of film noir.
One of the most pivotal movies in the timeline of films noirs is John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon because it introduced noir’s characteristic ambiguity without fulling giving way to the cynicism that would appear in later productions. As one of the first films noirs, The Maltese Falcon revolutionized Hollywood not only by serving as a point of rupture from the gangster and detective films of the 1930s but also by promoting a paradoxical view of American society. Though protagonist Sam Spade is derisive towards law and authority, he is ultimately an icon of wartime American masculinity and

The Maltese Falcon is actually based on a hard-boiled novel by Dashiell Hammett written in the 1930s which, of course, stars the iconic hardboiled detective Sam Spade (Gates 7). During the previous period of gangster and detective films, the protagonists were not cynical or defeated members of the working class but “suave, charming, "soft-boiled" gentlemen” (Gates 10). Again, because of the disillusionment that accompanied the stock market crash, the Depression-era hero salvaged a thread of optimism that good would win out, unlike his hard-boiled counterpart who struggled to triumph over the forces of evil. The distinguishing features of this “soft-boiled” detective were that he was upper class, yet lacked the family pedigree and education typically associated with upward mobility: he was a shred of hope during a time where the American Dream had been corrupted (Gates