Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 172: Thu Jun 23

The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm


This film, part of the monthly 16mm Cine-Real events at the Castle Cinema, will also be screened on June 26th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The key film in the Bogart myth (1941). I don't want to knock it, but what John Huston does with Bogart's personality and the hard-boiled genre in general has always struck me as pale compared to the Howard Hawks films that followed (To Have and Have NotThe Big Sleep). The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur?
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

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