In an essay on Henry James, James Thurber recounts a night in a "New York boite de nuit et des arts called Tony's," where Dashiell Hammett announced that "his writing had been influenced by Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove." Although confessing his inability to find "many feathers of The Dove in the claws of The Falcon," Thurber discovers a few useful parallels: a fabulous fortune at the center of both books, two designing women who lose their...

[Huston made from The Maltese Falcon] one of the classics of dark cinema, a film important not only for its fidelity, but because it bears his own distinctive signature. The very choice of Falcon was consistent with the personality Huston would convey in nearly all his subsequent work—perhaps Falcon even determined that personality to some degree. Notice how neatly it fits into the Huston canon; most of his good films—Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, We Were Strangers, The Asphalt Jung...

[The Maltese Falcon reveals John Huston's] style at its best—direct, analytic, and disciplined. This film succeeds brilliantly as a character thriller, but also, through its ruthless elimination of inessentials, gains an extra depth. All the characters are obsessed; their lives are devoted to one pursuit only, the acquisition of money (in the shape of the fabulous maltese falcon, "the stuff that dreams are made of"). The Maltese Falcon and, later, The Treasure of Sierra Madre sho...

The first movie [John Huston] directed, The Maltese Falcon, is the best private-eye melodrama ever made. San Pietro, his microcosm of the meaning of war in terms of the fight for one hill town, is generally conceded to be the finest of war documentaries. Treasure of Sierra Madre, which he developed from B. Traven's sardonic adventure-fable about the corrosive effect of gold on character, is the clearest proof in perhaps twenty years that first-rate work can come out of the big commercial studios. Mos...

[We Were Strangers is a] collective study of men in a crisis. (p. 82) Huston has … conceived his film as a melodrama—which has earned him the disapproval of those who consider that melodrama should be reserved for "unimportant" subjects like The Maltese Falcon, and who feel that it vitiates anything more "serious". Nevertheless, there are many major dramatic and literary works highly seasoned with melodrama…. The flaws in We Were Strangers are in details of t...

[In the many critical analyses of The Maltese Falcon] one structural device … has received little if any attention—the use of pairings. Through the introduction of traditional pairings (lovers, business partners, etc.) Hammett sets up the appearance of order. As the novel progresses, however, the order is revealed to be illusory, a facade masking a world in which no one can be trusted, a world in which emotion and greed rule, a world, in short, of disorder. The first pairing presented in the n...

[In The Maltese Falcon] Huston displays a rare talent for the film medium is in his exact manipulation of his actors, cameraman, set designer, and others, to capture such a rich, near flawlessly correct mood, not just at moments and scenes but throughout the length of the film. It is an extremely powerful and richly suggestive work and has a rare solidity as a whole. It is a great film. (p. 49) [Huston's hand is] obvious in his superb relating of actors to the camera, as in the way the latter closes ...

["The Maltese Falcon"] turns out to be the best mystery thriller of the year, and young Mr. Huston gives promise of becoming one of the smartest directors in the field…. [With "The Maltese Falcon," Mr. Huston gives] us again something of the old thrill we got from Alfred Hitchcock's brilliant melodramas or from "The Thin Man" before he died of hunger.