Review of The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Flawed in a way that also undermines much subsequent noir: Spade is almost emotionless, a homo economicus who cares as little about the loss of his partner as Charles Foster Kane does about the loss of his child. This feature is very unfortunate if the “genre” is to be viewed as criticism of a hardening, uncaring society, a development caused in large part by the misunderstanding that real humans are or should be like Spade.