The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon (1941) is John Huston's defining crime noir you can watch online on iFILM. Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade, a San Francisco private detective with a sharp tongue and a strict moral code he enforces entirely on his own terms. A woman calling herself Miss Wonderly (Mary Astor) walks into his office with a story about a missing sister. His partner is dead by nightfall.

The trail leads to a black enamel statuette of a falcon — said to be a jewel-encrusted tribute sent by the Knights Hospitaller to the Holy Roman Emperor in the 1500s, stripped bare and repainted over the centuries. Hunting it: the rotund, soft-spoken schemer Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet, in his film debut at age 61), the jittery Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), and the client herself, who changes her name and her story as often as needed. Spade methodically peels every lie back. It takes a very cold calculation at the end.

Huston wrote the screenplay at 34 and directed it as his debut feature, lifting Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel almost word for word. Two earlier adaptations existed and were forgotten. This one became the template for film noir — the lighting, the cynicism, the femme fatale, the morally ambiguous detective. Watch The Maltese Falcon (1941) online on iFILM.