The Maltese Falcon

One of the masterpieces of Hollywood, the John Huston directed Humphrey Bogart masterpiece made in 1941.
This is one of the ultimate pieces of noir cinema. We have the German-expressionist tinged angular shadows, across the rooms from the blinds and across the tops of the character's faces. Bogart himself seems like a black absence at times, along with the rather bizarre widow. The cheap Warner Brothers sets are all in place, bare and badly lit. The camera also uses him to loom out of focus in certain foregrounds. It uses well the classic noir narrative P.O.V. of just one character, but is well done at not making this too obvious.
The one person focus makes the film seem almost like a character study of a man going mad. The whole thing could really be going on in Sam Spade's head. This almost referenced at times, the nearly comical constant interruptions, moves, chases, how he has not one second for a personality outside the case. The terror of the webs and traps is the terror of a mind where the entire murky world collapses and closes in on him, a very personal, psychological breakdown.
The dialogue and story give a new definition to the term 'whipcrack', to be fair it does make sense but the sheer speed of movement and dizzying pace of explication is, frankly, sensational. It also keeps the whole piece going at a rocket pace, absolutely gripping.
Bogart of course is wonderful, gripping in his lurches. The smart move that compromises him (did he kill Archer?) very early on well sets up the ambiguity, out in the open rather than creeping up. The femme fatale is not the greatest performance, but she does well convey a world of lies, lies, lies, the psychological terror of that, the McGuffin of the falcon that it suggests is a Mabuse-like bringer of terror; this isn't true, it is simply in the lives of each character to bring this on themselves.
The setting, the focus, the serious plot drive (characterisation brought out through this, good structuralism there), end up giving us a portrait of a man trapped in a society that is simply what HE himself is, the walls of his mind will collapse in, a kind of dizzying terror. This is one of the real high points of Hollywood cinema, a special kind of masterpiece.