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"Let's talk about the black bird, by all means." Hammett's albatross, from the Knights Templar of Malta to the private eye's Frisco agency, the fabulous "dingus" at the center of John Huston's first whirl of seekers and patsies. The murder early on is compressed into abstraction, close-up of street sign dissolving to firing gun dissolving to ringing phone; Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) briefly contemplates his slain partner's vacant desk and orders it removed, he has a case to solve. The continuous flow of malice is drawn so tight as to abut on fatalistic farce, thus the perfumed sprite Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) and the mountainous collector Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) as the underworld's Laurel and Hardy. The steadiest alliance is to Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) the fidgety liar with "the schoolgirl manner," such is life in the Möbius strip of greed. "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter, huh?" Bogart surveys the noir tangle around him with a snarl and becomes an icon—his Spade is an indelible profile of American masculinity on the verge of war, gleefully debasing Wilmer the gunsel (Elisha Cook Jr.) and then reciting his code of honor as if in a trance. (He chuckles at his own trembling hand in the aftermath of a confrontation.) Floating through the ether is "a swell lot of thieves," vivid like Chester Gould panels: Astor's scent of danger, Lorre's swivels from courtliness to giggles to tears, Greenstreet's follia in the face of failure. "To plain speaking and clear understanding," the clenched lucidity of prose is the goal, keen technique that works an adamantine line of action from one claustrophobic interior to another. "The stuff that dreams are made of" in the netherworld of false idols and sacrificial lambs turns out to be an elevator to hell. The Big Sleep is an expansion, Chinatown an adjustment. Cinematography by Arthur Edeson. With Lee Patrick, Gladys George, Jerome Cowan, Barton MacLane, Ward Bond, James Burke, John Hamilton, and Walter Huston. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |