“Look at me, Sam. You worry me.
You always think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for
your own good. Some day you’re going to find
it out,” Effie Perine tells Sam Spade, early in The Maltese Falcon. Her
prediction does not come true, at least in the case of the Maltese falcon. Sam is always in control, always as slick as he thinks he is, as he becomes
involved with a cast of unsavory characters only to deliver them to the police. The preservation of justice in The Maltese Falcon gives the impression
of a more hopeful conclusion than later film
noir; “it’s subversive elements are, in the end, successfully contained,”
it seems. After all, the hero makes it
through mostly unscathed (aside from being “slipped a mickey”), the villains
are detained, and Archer’s death is avenged.
However, a closer look at Sam’s interactions with the female characters
(and their placement on Wood’s ideal
figures spectrum) reveals the subversive means by which justice prevails.
From American capitalist ideology,
or “the values and assumptions so insistently embodied in and reinforced by the
classical Hollywood cinema,” emerged two ideal figures: “The Ideal Male: the
virile adventurer, potent, untrammelled man of action,” and “The Ideal Female:
wife and mother, perfect companion, endlessly dependable, mainstay of hearth
and home.” Due to their incompatibility,
we also see their shadows, “the settled husband/father” and “the erotic
woman.” The Maltese Falcon has three female characters, each of which
occupy a different archetypal role.
Early in the film, Sam Spade interacts with each in succession, starting
with Iva Archer, just widowed wife of his murdered partner.
Waiting inside Sam’s office, Iva is
playing the part of the grieving widow, black dress and all, except her veil is
pulled up from her face. As soon as Sam
closes his door they kiss, more passionately than one would expect from a man
and his business partner’s wife. “Sam,
did you kill him?” she asks, believing she was the motive, the prize, for
Archer’s death. “Well, I thought you
said if it wasn’t for Miles, you’d…?”
Feeling foolish, she begs, “Be kind to me, Sam.” Sam points out the ridiculous contradiction
in her interrogation and plea by repeating them back to her: “You killed my
husband, Sam. Be kind to me!” When she asks him to come to her, he humors
her: “Soon as I can.” She pulls the veil
over her face, a mourner once again, despite the shadowed letters from the
window giving away whom she is really thinking about: SPADE is on the wall in
giant font, completely dwarfing the much smaller ARCHER.
Iva Archer is The Maltese Falcon’s ideal female, albeit a failure of an ideal
female. The only wife in the film, she
is hardly a perfect companion, dependable, or the mainstay of home. Her affair with Sam goes in the face of the
civilized values she is supposed to embody.
Not surprisingly, Sam, the ideal man, can hardly stand to be around
her. Their “staggering incompatibility”
apparent, Sam never offers her a seat, nor does he give her enough time to sit
down before shooing her away.
The ideal female’s shadow, the
erotic woman, is filled stylistically and narratively by Brigid
O’Shaughnessy. Miss O’Shaughnessy has
already given Sam two different aliases before revealing her real name to him
after letting him enter her hotel room, an act in itself unbecoming of an ideal
female. She is also in a state of
undress in her pajamas; what they look like might be more important than what
they are, though. The pajamas, along with
the furniture, are vertically striped, in contrast to the oblique shadows
coming through the venetian blinds. The
incongruity of lines parallels Brigid’s stories, which change multiple
times. Her voice becomes increasingly
desperate, and she pleads with Sam: “You’ve got to trust me, Mr. Spade.” The camera cuts to an unmoved Sam, sans
clashing shadows: “You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good.
It’s chiefly your eyes, and that throb you got in your voice when you
say things like, ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’”
Though not immune to all of Brigid’s charms, Sam never loses control in
their relationship; she remains a means to an end in solving the case, as if he
knows she is a femme fatale whom he
must get close to in order to get all the answers.
Effie Perine does not fit as neatly
into ideal female or its shadow as the other women. She cannot be the ideal female because she
works and she is unmarried. Neither is she an erotic woman because her
interaction with the protagonist is, on the surface, benign. In some ways she occupies a motherly role,
ever ready to offer helpful advice. In a
scene sandwiched by Sam’s aforementioned visits with Iva and Brigid, Effie
walks into Sam’s office, and we see the true nature of their relationship. Sam slumps in his chair as Effie sits on his
desk, the only instance in which Sam allows a woman to be above him. They talk nonchalantly about an otherwise
serious topic: the belief that Sam played a part in Archer’s death.
“Well, how did you and the widow
make out?” she asks, upon entering the room.
“She thinks I shot Miles.”
“So you could marry her?”
“The cops think I killed
Thursby…the guy Miles was tailing for that Wonderly dame. Who do you think I shot?”
“Are you going to marry Iva?”
“Don’t be silly. I wish I’d never laid eyes on her.”
“Do you suppose she could have
killed him?”
“You’re an angel. A nice, rattle-brained angel.”
Sam is more casual with Effie than
any other character, let alone female.
This casualness is punctuated when Effie makes and lights a cigarette
for him, an act teeming with symbolism in a film made under the Hays Code. Sam and Effie have a relationship outside the values seemingly extolled by classic
Hollywood cinema. Theirs is not a
relationship of “legalized heterosexual monogamy;” that is what Archer had, and
now he is dead. Nor is theirs like the
illicit union of Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, a pairing bound to end in disaster (though had
Sam been more passionately involved with Brigid, it could have been). The
Maltese Falcon shows an awareness of the “hopeless contradictions and
unresolvable tensions” of the ideal male/female pairing. The ideal, virile male—the only character
strong enough to enact justice—cannot be domesticated, lest he meet death or
become, in a sense, neutered, like Detectives Polhaus and Dundy, who must abide
by the law, a type of ideological values.
Neither can he allow a dangerous woman to control him, thereby bringing
on himself predictable ruin. Sam Spade
triumphs by going a route that cannot be categorized (as represented by his
relationship with Effie), which is truly subversive.
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