Maltese Falcon Essay

The movie The Maltese Falcon is about a private investigator who is striving to unravel the mystery surrounding a black enamelled bird known as the Maltese Falcon. Samuel Spade, the protagonist of the story, is what was known as a “hard-boiled” detective. Men such as that rarely show a tender side (if they have one). Likewise, they are physically tough, frequently resorting to guns or fists to get what they want. In addition, they tend to be amoral, yet with an inflexible code of honour of their

information for understanding gender issues in the society. The masculine and feminine divide used to represent the socially constructed sexual traits which men and women are expected to portray in their relationships and interactions. In The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, the characters strongly conform to socially constructed gender roles in the way they dress, talk and act. This paper explores how the main characters in the novel including the detective, Samuel Spade, his partner, Miles Archer

Dashiell Hammett is well known for his writing of the Maltese Falcon, with his original fiction character Sam Spade. Many people would think all authors brainstorm their stories, but this case is different. Dashiell Hammett’s life experiences, mainly as a Pinkerton detective, have influenced his inspiration for writing fiction detective stories. His father, an alcoholic and a womanizer, worked as a watchman, a salesman, and many other short-end jobs. At age 14, Hammett dropped out of Baltimore's

The Maltese Falcon (John Huston 1941) based on Dashiell Hammett's novel of the same name is a classic film known for its genre. As a first time viewer of the genre, film noir, I was not sure what to expect but was startled by the surprises entwined throughout the entire film. The femme fatale lures Miles Archer to his death and brings nothing but trouble for Sam Spade. But with any film there will always be monotonous scenes, Spade perpetrated that he knew everything from knowing a lie to knowing

The Maltese Falcon: A Personal Review As a millennial who grew up with an affinity for Star Wars and other blockbuster movies suffused with special effects, I have a particular proclivity to disregard black and white films as sluggish and unexciting. To say that The Maltese Falcon exceeded my expectations would be an understatement. Seven and a half decades later since its release in 1941, the movie simply refuses to show its age. Alongside producers Hal B. Wallis and Henry Blanke, director and

Deception is defined as a scheme to get what one needs in a dishonest way. The act of deception is one of the theme of the novel, The Maltese Falcon. It starts from Miss Brigid telling Mr. Spade that her sister had run off with a man called Thursby to San Francisco. That act is seen as a deception because she was not telling the truth. Miss Brigid was being deceptive because she wanted Spade and Miles to think that Thursby is a dangerous man and in the process when she kills when one of the deceptive

The Realm of Women in Literature      “So it is naturally with the male and the female; the one is superior, the other inferior; the one governs, the other is governed; and the same rule must necessarily hold good with respect to all mankind.” This quote, spoken by the famous Aristotle, proves to be timeless. The words express knowledge concerning gender that proves to be centuries ahead of its time. Aristotle however, may not have even realized the amount of truth expressed

Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, is a hard-boiled detective novel; a subset of the mystery genre. Before the appearance of this sub-genre, mystery novels were mainly dominated by unrealistic cases and detectives like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. As Malmgren states, “The murders in these stories are implausibly motivated, the plots completely artificial, and the characters pathetically two-dimensional, puppets and cardboard lovers, and paper mache villains and detectives of exquisite

day after a falling beam narrowly misses him in the street. As Spade tells it: “He went like that, like a fist when you open your hand” (Hammett 58). The incorporation of this short story has little if any significance on the actual plot of The Maltese Falcon. Through the character analysis of Flitcraft and Spade the moral of the parable becomes less superficial and takes on a much deeper meaning. This seemingly lack of significance leads to a focus on its underlying philosophic importance to not only

After reading The Maltese Falcon, By Dashiell Hammett and watching the film, By John Huston, there are many differences that are in reference to Sam Spade’s dialogue between the two genre’s. One specific scene that had caught my attention was within the exchange of money for the black falcon. In the novel, this scene was depicted in a different way versus what was displayed in the film. In order to pursue the exchange of the falcon, Spade needed Gutman to tell him everything about the case, so that