In prior weeks, I talked about movies that do genre so well they deserve to be on the list.
Chinatown is a great example because it’s not only a movie that did noir so well but found new ways to do it. See my review on that one.
But what about movies that invent a genre? Is that a genre movie? And this one in particular started off as kind of a genre picture—a mystery—but became so distinct that it became a genre all on its own.
Yes. Get your detective hats on! We’re talking about 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, written and directed by John Huston.
The interesting thing about noirs is that they often have very similar themes to each other. While the genre is great, this sometimes leads to a sense of sameness between many of them, kind of like how I’m sure all the Friday the 13th movies have similar themes (I’ll have to go through the deep intricate themes of Jason in Space sometime).
But if a film invents the genre and thus invented the standard theme that runs through it, then it’s doing something pretty cool. After all, it’s not the movie’s fault that so many other movies wanted to be it afterward. So the theme of this movie—and so many subsequent noirs—is “chaos results from greed.”
Not only could this be applied to many noirs but to many Coen Brothers movies, so many of them having some sort of briefcase of money at the heart of it.
Sam Spade is one character who resists greed. This might be because he resists so many emotions altogether, as the stone-cold dude doesn’t even seem to care that his partner is offed or the distress that his mistress goes through. But as he’s pulled into an ever deeper web of complications, backstabs, twists, and turns from Gutman (the fat man), Joel Cairo, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy), he holds strong and ultimately is the one person who can make sense of things.
This is often the role of the detective in noirs. He’s the one with the least emotion—the rock in the waves of people wanting. I mean, Jesus, dude is so lacking in emotion when his partner is killed, he might be a sociopath.
If you’re not familiar with the term MacGuffin, it’s the name of an object that everyone wants. It’s a device. But out of all the MacGuffins, the Falcon has become one of the most famous and sought-after ones.
The actual prop has become one of the most famous props in the history of movies, mirroring the desire that people have for it within the film.
And the movie itself has become the MacGuffin for many filmmakers. It does the detective story in a unique, cool way. Other people see it and want to create it. It stands as this symbol of doing film noir right, largely because it’s so responsible for creating noir.
But the movie emotionlessly acts like Sam Spade, being coolly what it is.
So is it the best noir? Maybe, maybe not. But what it did was get inventive. So inventive that others copied it to the point that it no longer seems as original as what it was.
But the Falcon is just a Falcon, and imitations of it won’t do as well. Instead of imitating the dark shadows and types of characters, we can instead take the spirit of it: inventiveness.
Because as long as we have that spirit, we’ll be able to create many, many different kinds of works and genres never created before.
And inevitably, they will be copied.