Cinemavenger

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The Maltese Falcon

Trying to get two or more people to agree on anything is as easy as putting shoes on a snake. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead from the current Coronavirus outbreak, and people can't agree on whether to wear protective masks in public, for fuck's sake. So when a movie has a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it probably doesn't suck.

The Maltese Falcon is one of a very small number of movies to earn that rarified rating, and nearly 80 years after its release pretty much everybody is still all up on its dick. Featuring Humphrey "Here's Looking At You Kid" Bogart in one of his earlier starring roles, The Maltese Falcon isn't just a noir mystery full of tough guys, femmes fatales, and cool cat dialogue, it's a pop culture Fertile Crescent.

All you Stars Wars fans (assuming there are any of you left after the last six movies), where do you think the Millennium Falcon got its name? And if the fact that Bogie's man's man, all go no quit, smart-ass, rogue private detective Sam Spade was the inspiration for the similarly styled, shoot-first-ask-questions-never Han Solo makes you go hmm, well then you're just not paying attention.

Shakespeare may have coined the first version of the phrase "the stuff that dreams are made of," but there's less doubt than the outcome of a professional wrestling match that The Maltese Falcon exposed way more of the world to it and made it a permanent part of the cultural lexicon. Peter "Peter Pumpkin Eater" Lorre's shifty criminal in this flick, and others, morphed into Ren of Ren & Stimpy fame, and Ren's refrain that Stimpy is a "fat, bloated, idiot" tracks directly back to a Lorre rant in The Maltese Falcon.

Even today, this flick still packs punches and surprises. For all y'all that bitch about the movie biz having been destroyed by the remake/reboot/sequel machine, did you know that The Maltese Falcon wasn't just adapted from a 1930 Dashiell Hammett novel, it was the third film based on that story? That's right, The Maltese Falcon was a double reboot!

Stick that in your statue and . . . then lose the statue for decades until it motivates massive amounts of murder and mayhem.

May 15, 2020