John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon ends with a punch in the gut, as detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) quips, “It’s the uhh.. stuff that dreams are made of,” at the sight of the love of his life being led away by the police to be convicted for the murder of his business partner. A pioneer in the film noir genre, the narrative explores greed’s deadly toll, as five different people, obsessively vie for a priceless statuette, willing to betray, deceive, or even kill to possess it. In this article, we’re examining how Spade’s response to Detective Polhaus when he asks about the black bird statuette, “It’s the uhh.. stuff that dreams are made of,” is a sardonic commentary on the fundamentally hollow nature of the quest that has driven every character in this dark tale of greed, deceit, and betrayal to their ultimate fall. To Give You A Little Context… The Maltese Falcon is a statuette of a bird, made of gold, studded with valuable jewels, and then covered in black enamel to hide its worth. Detective Spade gets tangled in the chaos when his partner, Miles Archer, is mysteriously killed after they take up Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s case to track a man who supposedly kidnapped her younger sister. Brigid is also one of the pursuers for the Maltese Falcon that Spade realizes only after it is too late. By then, a lifeless bird had claimed a lot too many lives. As if divine justice, the bird that everyone quite literally...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Wednesday, 15 October