skinny.

Latest / The Kulturecast

Required Viewing 07: The Maltese Falcon

It's the stuff that dreams are made of. This week on Required Viewing, we go after John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), the third screen version of Dashiell Hammett's novel and the one that stuck, turning Humphrey Bogart into a star and handing a first-time director the keys to what many call the first great film noir. We get into Bogart's Sam Spade, a detective whose code is hard to tell apart from self-interest; the gallery of grifters played by Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet; the Production Code pressures shaping what the film could say; and how a black bird that turns…

The skinny

The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.