Drawing on the railroad's linear path as a model for preserving narrative continuity, The

Great Train Robbery (1903) became the first film to follow a single line of action. The

film was enormously popular, and, as Kirby suggests, it "did much to set cinema on a

firmly narrative path" (55).

 With the unyielding pursuit of a mythical bird at its core, The Maltese Falcon is

similarly set on a decisively narrative course. The film itself makes an implicit argument

in favor of narrative continuity. All along, Spade is preoccupied with getting the story

straight. Even more than the discovery of the elusive falcon, he is concerned with keeping

the plot on track-of, as he puts it, keeping in touch with "all the loose ends of this dizzy

affair if I'm ever going to make heads or tails of it." By the end, he appears to succeed:

the central mystery has been resolved; the partner's murder will be avenged. Although

the falcon remains missing, the plot's loose ends are tied up. Action, in other words, leads

to narrative resolution. Most critics of the film seem to agree, for they have almost

exclusively focused on its swift, dramatic action. After all, idling to look at whirring fans

and fluttering curtains would be futile when it is action that photoplays are made of.5 So

when it was first released, reviewers like Bosley Crowther hailed The Maltese Falcon for

its "brisk" pace (127). This view has since been consistently reinforced in the extensive

scholarship on the film. William Luhr, for instance, analyzes it as the ideal example of

classical narration, while Richard T. Jameson draws attention to the film's "compulsive

momentum," suggesting that, "like its elusive namesake, [it] is eternally in motion" (46,

40). In other words, The Maltese Falcon is widely regarded as an exemplary case of

continuity filmmaking, where the plot keeps moving till the end. Nothing, not even

intriguing objects, could stall its momentum. As Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell