Hacker Cinema
The Maltese Falcon
1931 · Film · 80 min
Directed by Roy Del Ruth
A lovely dame with dangerous lies employs the services of a private detective, who is quickly caught up in the mystery and intrigue of a statuette known as the Maltese Falcon.
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3 comments on Hacker News
It sucks that the copyright period in the US is so ridiculously long, but it still makes me happy to see stuff finally entering the public domain again.
I don't care much about Betty Boop and I don't really care about Pluto and Mickey all that much, but I'm very excited for The Maltese Falcon's novel being available, since I think that that one could actually be adapted into something pretty modern.
Also, All Quiet on the Western Front is very arguably one of the very best movies ever made, and certainly one of the very best of the 30's if nothing else, so I am very much looking forward to fan restorations.
The maltese falcon (the book, not the movie) is entering the public domain next year!
Surprised there is no mention of Dashiell Hammett, a contemporary of Christie's. He wrote The Maltese Falcon in 1930, introducing the world to Sam Spade, an interesting contrast to Hercule Poirot. The interwar period certainly was the golden age of detective and mystery novels, whether they were more in line with the Christie formula or followed a more hard-boiled, American style.
I wonder to what degree the novels of that period informed the more paranoid, Cold War-era novels and films after WWII. John le Carré and Ian Fleming obviously come to mind, but Orson Welles's The Third Man and Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity are also great explorations of the postwar noir genre.
I'm sure there are essays about how it's all connected, and how it can probably be traced back to early mysteries like Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, but I haven't found anything yet that charts the history of the genre and explains the relative stability of its tropes and motifs over time.