A heavy beam fell from the sky as he is walking by a construction sight, narrowly missing what would surely have been his early, accidental death.
When he was much younger he had been hired to track down a guy, Flitcraft, that had survived a near fatal accident. Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy are laying in bad after making love when Spade tells her the story. He stays ambiguous to the end.īy contrast, in the book Dashiell Hammett makes a point of departing from the tight storyline by offering one key window into Spade’s psyche and motivation: the Flitcraft parable. In Bogart’s movie rendition, Spade’s enigma is never explained. He seems not to live by so many of the wider society’s principles, but he has some kind of internal code, though what it amounts to is unclear. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.” That Spade detested his partner makes this statement of principle all the more striking. “It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it,” Spade says. Spade, a seemingly amoral private detective who nevertheless still abides by some kind of code, becomes even more of an enigma in Bogart’s performance. Humphrey Bogart stepped into the role of Sam Spade as though the character were a tailored suit. The film is a tightly constructed, perfect example of film noir, possibly the first film noir. Here’s what I don’t do: I don’t make them watch the brilliant 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston. And finally I get to situate the formal analysis in a wider context–the novel appeared in 1930 shortly after the start of the Great Depression–which usually generates some befuddled conversation about why such a genre would be developed at that point in time and what that does for our understanding of the novel. The process of formal analysis also allows me to point out that the novel offers a striking example of a MacGuffin–a plot device that catches the reader’s and the characters’ attention but is unimportant in itself except as a means of driving the plot forward. It enables me to push the students on their formal analysis because I get to introduce a new genre: the hard-boiled detective novel. The novel allows me to make any number of observations that develop the larger themes of the course. One my favorite parts of the course is discussing Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.
Each year I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on U.S.
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