The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Huston · a film · 1941 · about 100 minutes · written by John Huston from the novel by Dashiell Hammett · in English
Mode
Detective film played as a comedy of manners and a chain of bargains, ended not by a deduction but by a renunciation
Mythos
The grail sought by a fellowship of thieves and found to be lead; the private man of a public trade who keeps his own law; the woman whose every story is a lie and whose love may be real
Phase
From a partner shot on a night street to a woman taken down in an elevator, with the bird’s passage from the Knights of Malta told in a title card and a fat man’s account
Presentation
Feature film, about 100 minutes, black and white, Academy ratio, in English; a handful of interior sets and a few exteriors; the camera bound to the detective and never inside a head
Register
Cool, quick and ironic; talk in rooms, superbly paced, broken by a slap, a death in a doorway and a fat man’s laugh
Scale
One detective, three thieves, a woman and a bird, in a few rooms of one city
Governing Proposition
A private detective whose partner has been shot is drawn into the hunt for a jewelled bird that three thieves and a lying woman have chased across the world, and when the bird comes it is lead. The wager of the film is that a world of bargains can be shown only from outside, in what people say and do in front of one man, and that the man who plays the game best keeps faith with a code whose reasons he cannot fully give.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a legend. A short title card tells of the Knights of Malta and the tribute of a jewelled falcon they sent to Charles V in 1539, and of its loss. Then San Francisco, in a few exteriors, and a detective’s office. The legend is set out in a sentence or two and put away. It will come back when the detective needs it, and at the end it will be scraped open on a table.
Warner Bros. released the film in October 1941, in black and white, at about 100 minutes. It was John Huston’s first film as director, from his own screenplay of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, serialized in 1929 and published in 1930. Hal B. Wallis produced it, with Henry Blanke as associate producer; Arthur Edeson photographed it, Thomas Richards cut it, and Adolph Deutsch wrote the score. It was the studio’s third version of the novel, after Roy Del Ruth’s film of 1931 and the loose comic remake Satan Met a Lady of 1936, and the one that kept Hammett’s dialogue and his hard ending.
Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade; Mary Astor, Brigid O’Shaughnessy; Peter Lorre, Joel Cairo; Sydney Greenstreet, in his first screen role, Kasper Gutman; Elisha Cook Jr., Wilmer; Gladys George, Iva Archer; Lee Patrick, Effie Perine; Jerome Cowan, Miles Archer; Barton MacLane and Ward Bond, the police. The world is a handful of rooms: the office of Spade and Archer, Spade’s apartment, Brigid’s apartments, the hotel rooms of Cairo and Gutman, the corridor and lobby of Gutman’s hotel, and one night street.
Movement II
A client comes to the office, Archer takes the job, and that night he is shot on a street at night. The opening killing binds Spade to the case, and the obligation it lays on him, to a killed partner, is the first of the reasons he will give at the end. The film sets it down in the first minutes and lets it wait.
Spade is not clean. He has been sleeping with Archer’s wife, and Iva, now the widow, comes to him with her claim; the police come to him too, twice, and he deals with them as he deals with everyone. Brigid’s story changes each time he meets her, and each version is played as true while it lasts. Astor plays the lies so that they read as lies only the second time through: the film asks the viewer to weigh her as Spade does, by what she says and how she says it, and gives no other evidence.
That is the form of the whole. The camera is bound to Spade in nearly every scene and never enters a head. Brigid’s motives, Gutman’s history and Spade’s own feelings are given only as speech and face. The film knows people the way a detective knows them, from outside, as performances, and it makes the audience a detective too.
Movement III
Joel Cairo calls at the office with a perfumed card, then searches it at the point of a tiny pistol. Spade, grinning, slaps him and takes the gun. A second bidder has entered, and the hunt is shown to be a comedy before it is shown to be a murder. In the hotel lobby a young man waits and watches: Wilmer, the third party made visible, whom Spade will disarm.
Gutman receives Spade in his suite. Greenstreet fills the frame, shot from below, courtly, laughing, “By gad, sir”. In his first scene he names the prize; in his second he explains it, telling the bird’s history from Malta through Sicily, Paris and Constantinople. The legend arrives exactly when Spade needs it, and it is told, a story within the story.
In the suite Spade is drugged. Edeson shoots it low, with the ceiling in view, and Spade falls in a room that seems to close over him. The thieves are a comedy of manners played straight, fat, effete and young, with a coding in Cairo and Wilmer that the Production Code forbade the film to name and that it let stand in plain view. Every meeting in these rooms is a negotiation, with its terms, its threats and its laugh.
Movement IV
Captain Jacoby, played by Walter Huston, staggers into the office with a bundle and dies in the doorway. It is the most abrupt event in the film, and it is required. The bird must come from the sea, as the legend said it was lost at sea, and it must cost a life to deliver.
The last movement is a night in Spade’s apartment, in one room. Gutman, Cairo, Wilmer and Brigid are there with Spade, the bird is to be delivered, and the bargaining is open. Alliances regroup around the table as the terms change, and Edeson’s groupings shift with them. Gutman hands over his own boy to Spade as the “fall guy”, and the young gunman, disarmed, is a term in the bargain like the envelope of thousand-dollar bills.
The bird arrives. Gutman sets to it at the table with a penknife, scraping at the black enamel, and finds lead. His voice rises and breaks into laughter. What four people have chased across the world is a fake, and Gutman sets out at once to chase it again. The grail has turned to base metal, and the fellowship of thieves is still in quest.
Movement V
Spade and Brigid are left alone, and he tells her he is giving her to the police. His reasons come as a list: his partner, his business, his own risk. Then he admits he may love her and sends her over regardless. Bogart plays it close and fast, the face working against the words. The film does not decide whether the code is honour or self-protection, and it does not need to: the gap between the reasons and the face is what it shows.
The police come. The bird is given its last name, “the stuff that dreams” are made of. Brigid goes into the elevator, the gate closes, and its shadow falls across her face like bars as the car goes down. Spade takes the stairs with the bird. The man who held all the cards is left with a lump of lead, and the film ends on the one moment of height it has kept for last.
The film had three Academy Award nominations, for Picture, Supporting Actor for Greenstreet and Screenplay, and won none; it was named to the National Film Registry in its first year, 1989. It set Bogart’s screen persona for Casablanca (1942) and The Big Sleep (1946), launched its director, whose The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is another quest for worthless treasure, and left a template still in use, down to Chinatown (1974), which casts Huston as its tyrant. Hammett’s novel stands on the desk at 8.2. The film stands at its own height, built of his words, on what a camera bound to one man can and cannot know.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and very little gives. Archer’s death opens the case and binds Spade to it: the obligation to a killed partner is the first reason in the last speech, and it is set in the first minutes. Cairo’s search of the office, a tiny pistol in his hand, brings in a second bidder; Wilmer in the lobby makes a third party visible; Gutman’s first scene names the prize and his second explains it, so the legend arrives when Spade needs it and not before. Jacoby dying in the doorway is the most abrupt event in the film and is required: the bird must come from the sea, and it must cost a life to deliver. What gives is small: Iva Archer does little but set out Spade’s compromised position, and Dundy’s two visits make one point twice.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: where everyone bargains, love and loyalty are terms in the bargain, and a man keeps faith only with a code whose reasons he cannot fully give. Spade’s last speech sets his reasons out as a list, partner, business, risk, then admits he may love her and sends her over regardless. The film does not decide whether the code is honour or self-protection, and that undecided truth holds; it is the film’s and not the novel’s alone, since Bogart plays the gap between the reasons and the face. Beneath it lies a plainer truth, the grail turned to lead. What holds the axis is range: greed is a comedy of manners and a mechanism of plot rather than a social condition, the city, the law and money stay background, and Brigid’s falsity is given as her nature more than disclosed as a condition.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The register is cool, quick and ironic, and elevation is not its mode; where the film rises, it rises cold. The elevator gate closing on Brigid, its shadow falling across her face like bars as the car goes down, is the summit and a real one. The last speech, played close and fast with Bogart’s face working against the words, has dread in it. Gutman scraping at the black enamel with a penknife and finding lead, his voice rising and breaking into laughter, is a comic sublime; his suite, shot low with the ceiling in view as Spade is drugged and falls, has a nightmare weight, and Jacoby’s death in the doorway is a shock. What holds the axis is frequency: long stretches are talk in rooms, superbly paced and level, and the score adds little height.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The myth is built and bears weight. The falcon is a grail: the sacred tribute of a knightly order, lost at sea, passed through the hands of pirates and collectors, sought across the world by a fellowship of thieves, and found to be base metal. The quest is the plot, and the bird is its object from the first scene to the last. Spade is a figure the film helps to make rather than inherits whole, the private man of a public trade who keeps his own law and is alone at the end; Brigid is the woman whose every story is a lie and whose love may be real. The particular stays particular: a lead bird, a cigarette rolled, a tiny gun, an envelope of thousand-dollar bills. The limit: the quest is largely ironic and drawn in dialogue, the legend is told rather than embodied, and the archetypes are clearer as types than as myth.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is Hammett’s novel, filmed twice before by the same studio, in 1931 and as the comic Satan Met a Lady (1936), and the gangster and detective pictures of the 1930s. The turns are real. Huston kept Hammett’s dialogue and his hard ending, where the first film had softened the story and the second mocked it; the detective is neither clean nor sentimental, sleeps with his partner’s wife and gives the woman he loves to the police; the villains are a comedy of manners played straight, with a homosexual coding in Cairo and Wilmer that the Production Code forbade naming and the film let stand in plain view; Edeson’s low angles and ceilinged sets push the frame toward what would be called noir. The stake was modest, a first film on a proven text, and the swerve lies in tone and fidelity, placed carefully.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that nothing can be known about anyone but what they say and do in front of Spade. The camera is bound to him in nearly every scene and never enters a head; Brigid’s motives, Gutman’s history and Spade’s own feelings are given only as speech and face, and the viewer stands where Spade stands, weighing a performance. The rooms are the form: a handful of sets where people bargain, so that the film is a series of negotiations, each with its terms, and the last is the longest. Edeson’s framing works for it, Gutman shot from below and filling the frame, groupings that shift as alliances shift. What holds the axis: the binding apart, the grammar is the studio’s, used with great economy rather than remade, and the stage play is never far below the film.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Eighty-five years of return are evidence. The film has carried a long criticism: as the opening of American film noir, argued for and against since the French critics named the cycle after the war; as the first film of an auteur and the making of Bogart’s persona; as a text of the Production Code’s evasions, in the coding of Cairo and Wilmer and the fate of Brigid; and in feminist readings of Brigid as the type of the femme fatale. The questions stay open: why Spade gives her up, whether his list of reasons is the truth or a defence, whether he loves her, and whether the story is a critique of capital or a comedy about it. Astor’s lies are legible on a second viewing. What holds the axis: much of the yield is a genre’s and an industry’s history rather than new depth, and the plot, once known, closes.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Released in 1941, in the field of the cinema of the 1940s, which also holds Citizen Kane, Casablanca and the neorealists. The intrinsic force is real but bounded: the film fixed the screen idiom of the hardboiled detective, laconic, compromised and alone in a world of liars, and showed a studio that a faithful, dark adaptation with a hard ending could work. It did not reorganise what film could do, as Kane did the same year. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film is commonly treated as the first American film noir, a claim contested, with Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and earlier European work set against it; it set Bogart’s screen persona for Casablanca and The Big Sleep and the tough private eyes after him; it launched Huston, began the pairing of Greenstreet and Lorre, and left a plot of thieves chasing a priceless object that is still in use. Wide reach, largely within genre and persona.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-five years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, and restorations are repair. A colorized version made for television in the 1980s is an altered copy that never displaced the original, which has stayed the version shown, and it takes nothing from the work. Presence has been continuous and wide: repertory, television from the 1950s, every home format, the National Film Registry in its first year, teaching in film and in the study of genre, and lines from it in common speech. The surface, the San Francisco of 1941 with its hats, offices and telephones, ages as period rather than as fashion, and the talk keeps its snap. The studio artifice of the sets is the smallest charge, a fabric of its time that the film’s method uses.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in two places. The screenplay keeps Hammett’s dialogue and cuts the novel to a frame with no slack. The casting and playing are among the most exact of any studio film: Bogart’s Spade, quick, amused and dangerous, the face working through the last speech; Greenstreet’s laugh and his “By gad, sir” in a first screen role that seems a career; Lorre’s perfumed card and anxiety; Cook’s boy gunman; Astor’s Brigid, whose lies are played as lies the second time through. Edeson’s low camera is exact, and Thomas Richards’s cutting keeps pace through rooms of talk. The charges fall where they matter: the sets are visibly sets and the frame often stage-bound; Deutsch’s score is conventional and underlines; the police are flat; Iva is played broad.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Spade grinning as he slaps Cairo and takes his gun, and Spade’s face as the elevator takes Brigid down. One law governs both: every person is a player in a bargain, and Spade’s mastery is that he plays the game better than anyone while declining to be owned by it. The comedy of Cairo’s perfume, Gutman’s courtliness and Wilmer’s humiliation, disarmed by Spade and then handed over by his own master as the “fall guy”, obeys the same law as Archer’s death and Brigid’s arrest, and the law reaches the bird itself, a bargain counterfeited. The range runs from drawing-room comedy to murder and renunciation, wider than the genre usually holds, and the tone never breaks. What holds the axis: the law governs a few people in a few rooms, and Dundy’s police strain it, belonging to a plainer picture.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 100 minutes holds. Consciousness is held only from outside, by design. Money is the medium of every relation; the law is present in the police and the district attorney, briefly, and in Spade’s dealings with both; sex and love are held in Spade, Brigid, Iva and Effie; history enters as legend, in the title card and in Gutman’s account of the bird’s journey from Malta through Sicily, Paris and Constantinople, told rather than held. These are joined in the plot of the bird rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: there is no family, no labour beyond the detective’s trade, no state beyond the police, the sacred only as a counterfeit relic, and the city is a handful of rooms. A small form, and the figure describes it.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, The Made at 8.5, then Pressure on Tradition and The Inner Law at 8.4. A film whole in one version and continuously present for eighty-five years; a screenplay with no slack and casting as exact as any in the studio era; the screen idiom of the hardboiled detective fixed for a decade’s crime films; and one law of the bargain from a slap in an office to an elevator going down.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: money, the law, love and the legend of history are joined in the plot of the bird, while there is no family, no labour beyond the detective’s trade, the sacred only as a counterfeit, and the city a handful of rooms. Above it, The Sublime at 7.4: the elevator, the last speech and the penknife reach a cold height, but long stretches are talk at a level pitch.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 three tenths short, The Unconcealment at 7.9 six tenths short and The Swerve at 7.8 seven tenths short, the reach running through genre and persona, the quest drawn in dialogue and played ironically, the disclosure narrow in its human range, and the turn made on a proven text. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, below 7.5; no other axis it counts falls below 7.8, The Swerve. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.1, an average of 8.008 that displays 8.0, in Tier IV, at the foot of the tier and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Maltese Falcon as released by Warner Bros. in October 1941, the theatrical version, black and white, about 100 minutes, from the title card to the elevator: written and directed by John Huston from the novel by Dashiell Hammett (serialized 1929, published 1930), produced by Hal B. Wallis with Henry Blanke as associate producer, photographed by Arthur Edeson, edited by Thomas Richards, with music by Adolph Deutsch. There is one version; restorations are repair, and the colorized version made for television in the 1980s is an altered copy, not the object, and nothing is judged on it. No print or script was consulted. Three short phrases of dialogue are quoted, each held certain; other speech is described. Hammett’s novel is a separate work and is judged on its own page. Details that could not be verified, among them the date of the premiere, the billing of the cast, the length of the last night in the apartment, whether the detective is in every scene but the first shooting, how the film came to its director and its star, how the long take in Gutman’s suite was planned, and the number of years the bird has been chased, are not given.