Riddled with Words: 'The Maltese Falcon'

Sam Spade exhibits a degree of unhinged lunacy on par with Hamlet, and there’s something to that, isn’t there, because you know what they have in common? They’re both damaged goods. Hamlet’s uncle killed his father and then had shameless carnal relations with his mother. It’s enough to drive anyone to San Francisco, and Sam, well we don’t know what he’s been through but part of the art of filmmaking as John Huston so deftly demonstrates is knowing what to say and when to say it, yes, but also knowing what not to say. No, it wouldn’t do if we knew too much about Sam Spade, if we knew what abuses he’s endured. If we knew that we’d pity him, and worse, he wouldn’t be so damn cool.

Sam is pretty slick. He calls you sweetheart and gets away with it. He likes being the smartest guy in the room, it’s a hobby he turned into a career. He’s emotionally detached to a pathological degree (never does he express anything like grief over the death of his partner, except perhaps in the anger he directs at O’Shaughnessy while accusing her of being Archer’s killer), though he has appetites, like any other man, which isn’t to say he can’t love, because he can, it’s just he knows love is bad for business, and in his business, what’s bad for business gets you killed. More than that he knows love’s not to be trusted, having made himself an expert on such matters by sleeping with his partner’s wife. Sam’s no gambler but he can recognize a hand and knows when to hedge his bets. So if it comes down to you or him, sweetheart, it’s you all the way.

All the facts are on one side. Now, on the other side we’ve got what? All we’ve got is that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.

Sam’s affair with Mrs. Archer is revealed early in the story, just after Mr. Archer’s murder, a smart move by Huston as Sam’s infidelity is key to his psychology. It goes like this:

Sam knows there are bad people in the world, not just because he deals with them on a daily basis but because he is one. He understands this about himself even if he doesn’t care. Or maybe that’s selling him short. Maybe he does care but thinks he’s a lost cause, and maybe he’s right. Moreover, he may very well consider habitual depravity essential to his line of work. The people he encounters, clients and adversaries alike, the dreck washed up on his threshold by the feculent tides of desperation, envy, greed, and other sins are the kinds of people to whom sentiment is as blood in the water to a shark. It’s not if you can’t beat em join em, it’s if you want to beat em you better join em. Get soft and you’ll wind up a soft virgin corpse.

Still, Sam never sinks to the level of O’Shaughnessy or Gutman. He’s not a thief or a murderer. But he sinks just low enough to get a clear picture of the bottom, and there he floats, below him the pit, above him the crushing weight of penance. Maybe that’s why Spade likes being a private dick, because it puts him in contact with these scum-of-the-earth types who by juxtaposition make him look like a little angel. A bit petty, sure, but Sam has that side to him. Look at his face as he watches the fat man go to pieces along with the lead facade of the fake falcon. There’s something predatory in that Cheshire cat grin, coupled with disdain and no small measure of grim satisfaction. Nothing in the world brings him so much pleasure as watching Gutman despair as his grand designs for which he has been willing to sacrifice his analogous son fail to bear fruit. Spade delights in his comeuppance, drinking in the schadenfreude like lifeblood.

That is until it’s O’Shaughnessy’s turn to get hers. For that scene Sam’s grin disappears, replaced by his default hard-boiled stoicism that only just veils his desperate resignation. He knows O’Shaughnessy has to take the fall, all that’s left is to talk himself into it. She says she loves him but she’s never played square with him for half an hour at a stretch and anyway what if somebody finds out he not only let his partner’s killer get away clean but took her to bed? How can he be sure if he covers for her she won’t turn around and put the proverbial knife in his back? It’s the facts on one side and love on the other. One of those you can rely on.

Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready.

Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

Sam Spade is an action hero who riddles the bad guys not with bullets but with words. He hails down verbiage like a martial arts expert hails down blows. He’s the Jackie Chan of elocution. With words he dodges and deflects, charm and seduces, feints and strikes with machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat rhetoric, firing so fast his opponents hardly have time to put up their defenses and some of them come apart at the seams, like young Wilmer at whose armor of confidence and stoic machismo Spade chips away until it shatters altogether and Wilmer is reduced to an angry, tearful, fatherless boy.

All the same, Spade meets his match in Gutman, the fat man. The thing about the fat man is he’s fat, and nothing’s getting through that. He’s too old to be teased to shambles. He’s amused by Spade’s antics more than cowed, and the fact is that right up to the finish it’s in no way clear that Sam’s going to win this one. Matter of fact everything seems to be going just swimmingly for Gutman right up until he unwraps the counterfeit avian statuette, and that’s no clever switcharoo by Sam either. The falcon is made lead only by an act of cinematic providence. Why? Probably because the alternative would have been pretty boring. Moreover it lets Sam, and by extension us, relish the look of bewildered despair that graces Gutman’s flabby jowls.

For his part, Sam doesn’t seem the least bit surprised. Could it be that under everything he is, in his way, a man of faith? Not that he’d call it that. Sam has no use for faith. He believes what he knows, and what he knows is this: sooner or later, every bastard gets what’s coming to them, himself included.