Suggested by a friend as a must see for our festival. Boy was she right.
Specs:
1 hr 40 minutes, black and white. Available on dvd
Our family's average rating on a 1-10 scale:
8.5
More about the film and our reaction to it:
There's something about star power. Regardless of the era, regardless of the genre, regardless of color, black & white, sound or silence, and regardless of whether you are 10 or 40, you know it when you see it. And Humphrey Bogart had it. The man just controlled the screen. His voice, his smile, his cool demeanor and great hats...all adds up to one sweet gumshoe.
This film was mesmerizing and compelling, even though we didn't always follow the clever plot,; we were spellbound by the drama. Its enough to say this is your basic detective story. Murder, intrigue, twists and turns, satisfying conclusion and, by the end, a wish that this were a series rather than a single movie. Because you just can't get enough of lines like "he's so full of holes he couldn't have gone far," "when I slap you you'll take it and like it," "keep on riding me and they're gonna be picking iron out of your liver," or the classic "I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But if you lose a son its possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon."
Talented actors fill the cast - Mary Astor gives an incredibly interesting and believable performance as the apparently distraught sister who hands Bogart's Sam Spade the case and then turns out to be much much more. Fabulous Sydney Greenstreet is the big man sitting back and pulling all the strings. But most of all, the boys loved Peter Lorre as the wheezy-voiced, tightly-wound, nevertheless polite gangster Joel Cairo, with whom Spade has some tremendous interactions.
Iconic shot:
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