25. Private Investigations &...

Lyrics

It's a mystery to me
The game commences
For the usual fee
Plus expenses
Confidential information
It's in a diary
This is my investigation
It's not a public inquiry

I go checking out the report
Digging up the dirt
You get to meet all sorts
In this line of work
Treachery and treason
There's always an excuse for it
And when I find the reason
I still can't get used to it

And what have you got at the end of the day ?
What have you got to take away ?
A bottle of whiskey and a new set of lies
blinds on the window and a pain behind the eyes

Scarred for life
No compensation
Private investigations


This song proves that even a great band such as Dire Straits can have a misfire. First of all, in the clip the Dire Straits present themselves as a brooding, existentially sad group. This is an image that doesn't fit them at all and the video only becomes unintentionally funny because of it. The other problems I have with this song are more subjective, but I am not a fan of recital and I also find the song a bit monotonous. But the lyrics are admittedly interesting and were a good excuse for me to finally see a film-noir. It won't be the last time. One of the most important tropes of the film-noir is the femme fatale and there are still lots of songs to come about women who have hurt men in unexpected dark ways. Besides that I loved this film, which I chose because it was IMDB's highest rated noir about a private investigator.

The Movie: The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)

The Maltese Falcon has a, for its time, revolutionary long take lasting seven minutes. I am a big fan of long takes, but I only found out about this long take when I read something about this film, after watching it. This is such an entertaining, fun film that absorbs you so much into its wonderful plot and characters that you sometimes simply miss the technical details of the actual film making. It also feels like a more 'modern' film than John Huston's Prizzi's Honor, which he made 44 years later in 1985, despite the fact that it mostly consists of people in rooms talking to each other. John Huston doesn't spent much time introducing his characters; we are thrown straight into the plot from the beginning. In the first scene private detectives Sam Spade and his partner Miles Archer are asked to shadow some shady figure, in the second scene Miles is killed and in the third scene we and Sam find out that he is now a suspect in the killing of Miles. On top of this Sam finds out the woman from the beginning, Brigid, wasn't telling the (complete) truth and that she's involved in a quest for a Maltese falcon, together with a couple of other eccentric characters. This falcon is a so-called McGuffin, an object that is only important to set the plot in motion and move it along, like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. This comparison with Pulp Fiction isn't entirely coincidental. The movie often feels like a Tarantino movie made in 1941. Besides that it is adapted from a novel by Dashiel Hammett. These noirish novels by writers such as Hammett and Raymond Chandler were and are often called pulp fiction. It's fiction dealing with the slightly immoral, sleazy, lowlife characters in society.

What I liked most about the movie was that the position Sam has in the whole plot he's found himself in changes with each passing scene. Or, to put it pretentiously the dynamics of power are constantly shifting with each scene. In each scene Sam may find that he or some other character has some crucial peace of information which might change who has the upper hand. So Sam has to be constantly and fervently thinking and hustling in order to make the best out of the situation he is in. Even though he himself doesn't really have an idea of what exactly is the best (or worst) he can get. From the beginning till the end of the movie he doesn't have a moment of rest. He seems to be constantly thinking or doing something. Obviously in many movies when we see the lead character he or she is busy doing something. But we usually do have the feeling that that character isn't constantly busy. That during the time that we didn't follow him, he was sleeping or eating, or doing something else uninteresting and irrelevant to the plot. In the Maltese Falcon we get the feeling that even during the time we didn't follow Sam, he was doing everything in his power to solve his complicated situation. Sam Spade is such a greatly written character, that it made me want to read some novels by Hammett. But an important reason for why Spade is such a great character in this film is the way Humphrey Bogart plays him. This is now the only Bogart movie I've seen, but I am already convinced that he was indeed a great actor. At all times we have just as much information as Spade does, but Bogart makes it always look as if Spade knows a bit more than us and that he is absolutely confident that everything will turn out to be OK. But best of all, he plays Spade as someone who is amused by the situation he is in and who loves doing what he does, despite all the possible dangers. Bogart's Spade is someone who grins and smirks when he finds out something even though it may not be in his best interest. He has to contain his grin when questioning someone, because he simply loves it. An important reason for Spade's joy is probably also Bogart's own joy for the fact that he is making such a wonderful movie full of twists and turns and great dialogue for him to say.