The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“The first great film noir.”

Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir

John Huston’s directorial debut established the now-legendary Bogie persona: the snarling, cynical, self-reliant anti-hero whose tough-guy exterior masks the bittersweet soul underneath. French critic Nino Frank categorized The Maltese Falcon as one of four horsemen of what he termed noir, a series of films that had broken with ​“run-of-the-mill police dramas” to plunge into an oneiric mixture of anxious innuendo and violent candour. Humphrey Bogart is “​Spade, Sam Spade,” a San Francisco private eye caught up in a deadly search for the missing statuette of the title. Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook Jr. orbit the solid gold prize, ​“the stuff dreams are made of.” Huston, as would become his trademark, exhaustively charts the lures of greed and grotesque betrayal—just to mock its ultimate insignificance. This re-release, the most extensive restoration of the film to date, is sourced from the original nitrate negative.

Tickets for the opening-night screening of The Maltese Falcon (August 3) include admittance to the courtyard shindig at 6:00 pm featuring vinyl jazz, tasty treats, Luppolo beer, and your first shot at scoring our 2023 noir merch!

“Film noir was waiting to be born … Sam Spade set the stage for a decade in which unsentimental heroes talked tough and cracked wise.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“The chief character influence [here] is Humphrey Bogart, a man of explosive action in an iron mask … He has some of that magnetism you can feel through the screen; he is a villain with appeal. He has a good part here, [and] he fills it without trying.”

Otis Ferguson, The New Republic