Analyzing the rest of our classmates’ blogs we could find several relations with our movie, we realized that The Maltese Flacon wasn’t the only movie which fits with the characteristics of a Film Noir. "Citizen Kane" and "The Third man" as well as "The Maltese Falcon" are movies that use darkness and shadow as a recurrent source of color, but that is not the reason why they belong to this sub-genre, because there are others films made in black and white which are not Film Noir such as Casablanca and High Noon. Beside the use of shadow and darkness a Film Noir has the characteristic of having a plot which deals with death, mystery, conspiracy and there is usually a murder involve on it.
The three movies previously mentioned were released during the same period which is known as “The golden age” and excluding Citizen Cane, the others two movies were books at the beginning.

Some pictures of the movie...

Cinematography

In spite of the fact that "The Maltese Falcon" is a black and white movie, the low key ligthing is a beautiful piece of work made by the director of photography Arthur Edeson.

Ceilings were used to create an environment of confinement and claustrophofia, suggesting with this that the investigation of the case was very limited.

On the other hand camera angles are used to emphasize the nature of each character. The extreme close-up shots to the characters let the spectator notice the darkness of their personalities as well as the lack of truth in each one of them, allowing us to see them and analize them ni a deep way.

Background of the film

Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook) , Mr. Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) and Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart).

In the original novel "The Maltese Falcon" of Dashiell Hammett, detective Sam Spade was a sort of reflection of Hammett' own experiences as a private investigator for Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco. The character wasn't only invested with characteristics from the autor's personality but also was given his first name, Samuel.
This novel had inspired two more versions before the one from 1941. The first " Maltese Falcon" was released ten years earlier with the actor Ricardo Cortez playing detective Sam Spade. The second version was called "Satan met a lady" and it was an adaptation that turned the original mystery story into a light comedy and with the characters renamed. It was releasedin 1936 with a young Bette Davis and Warren William in the main roles.
Warner Brothers had problems and were warned by the Hays Code censors about the re-realising of the 1931 film for its content being considered "lewd" or, in other words, obcene. This fact was probably taken into account at the moment of producing the new, cleaned-up version (it was just in 1966 when unedited copies of the 1931 film could be shown in USA. But the new film wasn't free of controversy yet since the censors still considered that it had certain homosexual implication, specifically in Elisha Cook' character, Wilmer Cook, who was Mr. Gutman's loyal servant and thug. In fact is Hammett himself who describes the young Wilmer as a "catamite" (a young man involved in a sexual relationship with an older man) and because this term was objected and rejected by the publisher of the novel, Hammett was obliged to change "catamite" into "gunsel", a street slang with the same meaning. Very few people were familiar to this word and most of the readers understood that it refered to a "gun man", which was linked to the character.

Information taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon_(1941_film))

History

In July, 1941 the U.S. had not enter WWII yet. The climate in those years was thick, because of the possible role that the United States of America would play on the second world war. Although the U.S. tried to stay out of the butchery that WWII became, it was impossible to remain peaceful when in December, 1941, the Pacific side was attacked by Japanese bombers, destroying the American's military base: Pearl Harbour.

The movie was released in 1941, but the novel in which the movie is based on, was published in the 1930s. This was dangerously closed to 1929, the time when the stock market had a dramatic drop causing a Great Depression that affected the whole of the world's economy. Entertainment looked like the best way to escape from the cruel reality that the unemployment rates and the lack of food brought about. The gangster were also filling the streets and maybe detective and murder stories got their ideas from them. Headlines of that time were filled with the deaths the gangs left and the blood they spread in the search of revenge.

There is a lot to look at when analizing a film. It is important to know what important events surrounded the release year, or in this case the year when the novel was published. Furthermore, a movie can be better understood having the right perspective and the background that precedes a film.

Other Noir films...

"Murder, my sweet" by German Dmytryk (1944)
"Double indemnity" by Billy Wilder (1944)
"Laura" by Otto Preminger (1944)
"The naked city" by Jules Dassin (1948)
"Kiss me deadly" by Robert Aldrich (1955)
"Touch of evil" by Orson Welles (1958),this film, along with "The Maltese Falcon" are two of the most important noir films and marks the end of Film Noir era.


Take a look at this Orson Welles's classic at http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=s114Te8IDel

Mise-en-scene

*Setting: San Francisco, 1940's
*Acting: Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, Mary Astor as Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Gladys George as Iva Archer, Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, Barton MacLane as Det. Lt. Dundy, Lee Patrick as Effie Perine, Sydney Greenstreet as Kasper Gutman, Ward Bond as Det. Tom Polhaus, Jerome Cowan as Miles Archer, Elisha Cook Jr. as Wilmer Cook, James Burke as Luke, MurrayAlper as Frank Richman, John Hamilton as District Attorney Bryanmore.
*Costumes: Detectives->common clothing according to the age and middle social class which they belong to. The girl and rich people very fancy vintage clothes.
*Lighting: Very important, since the darkness of the scenes and the movie in general makes it a film noir with all its characteristics (suspense, crime, etc.)
*Make up: Nothing special, very common since it is a movie created in the 1940's that shows a story happening in the 1940's.
*Print: Non-Diegetic print .

A little bit of mystery...

Here you can see a piece of this great movie...take a look at it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KAaE_NFa5s