The Maltese Falcon 1941 detective movie

Name: The Maltese Falcon
Genre: Crime, Mystery, Thriller
Released: 1941-01-01
Rating: 4.6

The Maltese Falcon (1941, United States)

San Francisco private investigator Sam Spade meets in his office a prospective client, Ruth Wonderly, who looks for her missing sister. She provides the detective and his partner, Miles Archer, with the name of a man that most like knows something about the missing woman, Floyd Thursby. Spade and Archer agree to help to find the sister, but the case soon goes awry when police informs Sam that Miles was found dead. Spade tries to contact the client in her hotel, but is informed that she checked out. To make things worse, the police detectives tell him that Floyd Thursby was also killed that night, and they begin to suspect that Sam Spade had something to do with those two murders.

Classic detective film noir that more or less created the stereotype of a private investigator of the 1940s - tough, slick and always with a sharp remark ready at hand. Based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, who used to work as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco, The Maltese Falcon is an idealized look at the work of a private investigator, who takes a small, everyday case and end up tangled in a story involving an artefact that is hundreds years old.

Considered a classic of the genre, the film is filled with colourful characters, memorable quotes and intrigue that changes with every scene and none of the characters is crystal clear in the world of Sam Spade. A film worth to know even if you are not a great fan of detective movies.

Can you solve a mystery like this one?

TRY IT YOURSELF ❱

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Watch The Maltese Falcon

Creators of The Maltese Falcon

John Huston

director

John Huston

screenplay

Dashiell Hammett

screenplay

Cast of The Maltese Falcon

as Sam Spade

as Ruth Wonderly

as Joel Cairo

as Kasper Gutman

as Iva Archer

as Lieutenant Dundy

as Effie Perine

as Wilmer Cook

as Miles Archer

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The Maltese Falcon quotes

Detective Tom Polhaus:
[picks up the falcon] Heavy. What is it?
Sam Spade:
The stuff that dreams are made of.

Ruth Wonderly:
I haven’t lived a good life. I’ve been bad, worse than you could know.
Sam Spade:
You know, that’s good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we’d never get anywhere.