It's Just A Flesh Wound is thrilled to select, with our 7th round pick, the movie that made Humphrey Bogart a major movie star, and influenced an entire genre;
"The Maltese Falcon (1941)"
Some housekeeping required to select this pick. "Rear Window" will be moved to the Thriller category and "The Maltese Falcon" takes the Pre-60's slot.
The Maltese Falcon is a
1941 Warner Bros. film written and directed by
John Huston, based on the
novel of the same name by
Dashiell Hammett, and starring
Humphrey Bogart as
private investigator Sam Spade,
Mary Astor as his
femme fatale client,
Sydney Greenstreet in his film debut, and
Peter Lorre. The film was Huston's directorial debut and was nominated for three
Academy Awards.
The story concerns the entanglement of a San Francisco private investigator with three greedy, unscrupulous and murderous adventurers who compete with each other to obtain a fabulous jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon worth millions.
The Maltese Falcon has been named as one of the greatest films of all time by
Roger Ebert,
[1] and
Entertainment Weekly,
[2] and was cited by
Panorama du Film Noir Américain, the French book that coined the term
film noir, as the first film of that genre.
[3]
The film premiered on
October 3,
1941 in
New York City and in
1989 was selected for inclusion in the
Library of Congress'
National Film Registry.
Links to follow after the long weekend. Have to run right now! Have a good weekend people!