So this is another John Huston-directed movie starring Humphrey Bogart, the third movie on the AFI list from that director/star pairing, after The African Queen and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

This is obviously way too much of a single director/star pairing on a list of 100 movies. But here’s the surprising thing: If you’d asked me ahead of time which of those movies should be the one keeper for this pairing, I would have said that The Maltese Falcon was obviously the most essential one. And clearly it is the most famous one, but my opinion now is that The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is waaaaaaaaaay better. Partly that’s just because Treasure is really good, but partly it’s because this was… kinda meh?

So the premise here is that a dame walks into a PI’s office and spins a tale of woe to Humphrey and his partner. The partner goes off to tail a suspected bad guy… and next thing you know, both the partner and the bad guy are dead, and everyone’s a suspect. What follows is a pile of revelations, accusations, threats, lies, and fights.

In principle, that’s all fine, but it never really worked for me, for I think four reasons:

  1. The writing just isn’t that sharp. A movie like this should have crackling dialogue, and this doesn’t. Everyone just kinda says stuff. It’s not embarrassingly bad, but there’s not really memorable exchanges or classic lines.
  2. There’s too much confusion. The movie is edited in such a way that you have no idea what’s actually happened — it’s entirely plausible that Bogart actually did kill one or both of the victims, as multiple people accuse him of. And given that we know that every character talking is lying nonstop, it’s hard to tell what’s actually real. The movie seems at some point to assume that you’re just taking some version of what a character says as true, even though there’s no reason at all to do so; but it leaves you feeling unmoored. When you’re constantly prepping for the rug to be pulled out from under you, you can’t get stable footing in the story.
  3. Bogart’s actions throughout are completely inexplicable. In basically every situation where he’s in trouble, his approach seems to follow the Jason Mendoza Molotov Cocktail method, just constantly ramping up the situation to a worse and worse state. And it’s not clear why he’s doing that; even at the end, when you know what everyone was doing and why (I guess, taking a pile of liars at face value for no reason just because the time is up on the movie), his actions still don’t make retrospective sense.
  4. There’s nothing else that makes the movie interesting. Visually, the movie is just there; there’s no fascinating interplay of light and shadow, there’s no clever use of perspectives or framing. It’s just a very straightforward, by the numbers kind of film.

I don’t really understand why this one is so famous. It’s not bad, but neither is it particularly good. There are better noirs and better Bogart films, just on the AFI list alone. This one can be safely dropped from the list despite its name recognition.