#31 ‘The Maltese Falcon’

Men Lying, Women Dying, and a Bird That’s Just a Metaphor for Misogyny

The Maltese Falcon (1941) is the granddaddy of film noir, the blueprint for every trench-coated tough guy and cigarette-smoking femme fatale who ever exchanged meaningful glances in a shadowy alley. John Huston’s directorial debut is a landmark, sure—but it’s also a deeply cynical, suffocatingly male parable about how women can’t be trusted, truth doesn’t matter, and the only thing worth chasing is a shiny object you’ll never actually get to hold.

Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade, the archetypal private eye with a moral compass that only works when he’s not horny. He’s smirking, snarling, and speaking exclusively in sentences that sound like they were written on a typewriter soaked in gin. He doesn’t care about justice, doesn’t care about people—he cares about control. Spade is the kind of man who sees grief as a weakness and women as either playthings or threats, depending on how well they lie.

Enter Brigid O’Shaughnessy, played by Mary Astor with trembling eyes and weaponized vulnerability. She’s the original noir femme fatale, which is code for “a woman who wants something.” The film frames her as dangerous because she’s manipulative—but in a world where every man is already lying, scheming, and double-crossing for personal gain, only the woman is punished for playing the same game.

Brigid lies. So does Spade. So does Gutman. So does Cairo. The whole cast lies, cheats, and shoots their way through a tangled plot over a jewel-encrusted MacGuffin, and somehow it’s Brigid who ends up in handcuffs, moral condemnation ringing in her ears while Spade gets to wax poetic about honor and “doing what a man’s gotta do.”

Let’s be clear: the film is not about the falcon. The falcon is a stand-in for everything these men want and will never have—wealth, control, certainty, power. And Brigid? She’s the real falcon: dazzling, mysterious, and ultimately reduced to an object lesson. Her fate is sealed not by justice, but by Spade’s need to assert moral superiority in a world where morality has already packed up and left town.

The dialogue crackles, the cinematography is tight and moody, and Bogart is iconic. But The Maltese Falcon is less a mystery than a ritualistic display of masculine authority—where men decide the rules, enforce the consequences, and cast the woman out at the end, not because she’s the worst, but because she dared to play.

3 out of 5 black birds
(One for the dialogue. One for Bogart’s trench-coated charisma. One for the way it shaped an entire genre. The missing two? Melted down and sold as a warning to any woman who thinks she can outplay the patriarchy at its own game.)