144. The Maltese Falcon (1940)

Directed By John Huston

Synopsis

Wow, doing a synopsis of this film is quite a hard task. Uhh... Bogart is hired tries to find a bird, bird is fake everyone but him goes in the slammer.

Review

I quite liked this, but I was watching it with two girls, my wife and our friend Sarah and they both quite disliked it. I don't know, maybe it is more of a boy thing - it's a bit of a Dick Tracy, detective adventure thing with relics and such.

This is one of those rare cases of films where you kind of wish it was longer, because the plot feels a bit crammed. There are so many twists and things happening here that although you are actually quite able to follow them you do feel that a little breather here and there would have made it a much more enjoyable thing.

This fast-pace is at the same time its great quality and its downfall. The acting is generally good; Humphrey Bogart is probably the worse actor in it, sometimes hamming it terribly. Peter Lorre is great however, because he hams it in such a cartoony way that it is no surprise that Mr. Cairo has become quite famous.

This isn't a great film, but it is an enjoyable one, at least for me. Oh, and from today there are going to be no more Amazon links because no one clicks them anyway and they are a shit-load of work for me.

So there.

Final Grade

7/10


Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The opening crawl begins: "In 1539, the Knight Templars [sic] of Malta, paid tribute to Charles V of Spain, by sending him a Golden Falcon..." This confuses two different religious orders of knights, both founded in Jerusalem.

The Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, known as the Order of St. John, have existed since 1048; they were in fact based in Malta from 1530 to 1798 and hence were also called the Knights of Malta. On the other hand, the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, also called the Knights Templar or just Templars, were founded in 1119 and became the sworn enemies of the first order. The Templars were actually disbanded by 1312, after King Philip IV of France had declared them heretics so that he could confiscate their wealth.

Maltese Falcon in 7 minutes: