The Plot

“In 1539 the Knights Templar of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels. But pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token, and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day.” This is the legend that makes our story possible.
It is set in San Francisco and it shows us two detectives who receive an unexpected visitor, a beautiful and apparently helpless woman that tries to save her sister from an evil man. She offers a big ammount of money to the detectives, who simply cannot refuse such tempting offer and beauty.After listening the terrible story and once they aggre to help the woman, detective Spade tells his partner Archer to follow Ruth who is meeting her sister and the misterious man the same night. He is killed and Spade becomes the main suspect of the crime. The suspense starts when he discovers that this helpless woman Ruth is not the person she says she is and finds out that she is involved in a sort of gang whose purpose is stealing a jewel-incrusted priceless falcon.
In his attempt to prove his innocence in the murder of his friend and partner, Spade gets more involved than he could have thought in this mystery and the story turns into an unpredictable series of actions where lies and criminals make this movie as juicy as it is.
Maltese Falcon is a movie charged with antivalues such as lying, murders, and the excesive importance they give to money, and as cloudy for the audience as for the characters themselves from the point that you never know who is the good and who is the bad or what is going to happen next.
In this context it has a sort of Hitchcockian style, dark, with the classic image of the femme fatale and a plot simple and terrifying at the same time.


Information taken from http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/falcon/