25 Gillis suggests that the caliber may have been changed because the thirty-eights were
an extremely rare model. "Given its rarity," he argues, "it was too valuable a piece to be
toted in the overcoat of a character the likes of Floyd Thursby" (30).

26 As Manny Farber, who has called the director "the Eisenstein of the Bogart thriller,"
suggests, Huston "rigidly delimits the subject matter that goes into a frame, by
chiaroscuro or by grouping his figures within the square of the screen so that there is
hardly room for an actor to move an arm" ("John Huston" 31).

27 Naremore adds that Edeson's cinematography invests[] all this paraphernalia with
uncommon intensity" ("John Huston" 157), but he does concede that there is nothing
visually exceptional about this sequence.

28 Before he began playing ambivalent noir heroes, besides the 1930s gangster films,
Bogart had appeared in several Westerns before his breakthrough performance as Duke
Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936).

29 Although he does not notice the horses, Naremore points out that mostot of the action
takes place inside four rooms-Spade's office, his apartment, and the hotel rooms of
Brigid O' Shaughnessy and Kasper Gutman. These rooms are roughly the same size, and
the last three contain ornate mantelpieces of the same proportions but with different
designs, as if Huston and his decorator were stressing a parallel to establish a basic
contrast" ("John Huston" 153).

30 Writing about the symbolic violence of the Oedipal narrative, Lee Edelman has argued
that "[t]he sequence in which Huston's father appears, which marks the falcon's first
appearance in the film's diegesis as well, can thus play out the Oedipal logic that results
in the patriarchal transfer of phallic authority from father to son" (80). The Maltese
Falcon, of course, is not the only time Huston deals with the Oedipus complex. In Freud
(1962), he returns to it explicitly, with the protagonist Dr. Freud saying of Oedipus: "the
shadow of this doom lies over us all."

31 Of course, John Huston also meant for the whole shoot, along with the repeated falling
and dying, to be a joke. An obviously upset Walter left the set at the end of the day, but
John wasn't finished with him yet. "The next day he had Mary Astor call Walter,
pretending to be John's secretary," asking his father to reshoot the scene. Whether he
realized it was Astor or not, Walter was not willing to go through it again. "Astor held the
telephone receiver out so everyone could hear," while Walter screamed: "'You tell my
son to get another actor or go to hell! He made me take twenty falls, and I'm sore all
over, and I'm not about to take twenty more"' (Grobel 221).

32 Luhr reports that the film was shot on a modest B-movie budget of $381,000 ("Falcon"
3).

33 Based on the illustrations in Ellen Stern and Emily Gwathmey's history of telephones,
the one in Spade's apartment appears to be from 1920 (32), which seems rather out-of-