The Antihero and Murky Morals in The Maltese Falcon: Zooming in on the Big Confrontation Getting Started
Paper by Brandon Weir.
John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) is a total legend in the film noir game—a genre that loves to drag you into a dark, twisty mess where nothing’s simple. At the center of it all is Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), a private detective who’s not your classic “ride in on a white horse” hero. Nah, he’s more like that guy who’s always got an angle, dodging through a world packed with liars, cheats, and backstabbers. There’s this one killer scene where Spade catches Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) red-handed in her betrayal, and it’s pure gold for showing off what this movie’s about. He’s cool as a cucumber while she’s falling apart, and the way the shadows creep in and the camera sneaks around just screams moral confusion. This paper’s gonna dive deep into that moment—how it flips the whole idea of a hero upside down and ties into the film’s big vibe of everyone being lost in the gray. It’s all about proving how The Maltese Falcon messes with what’s right or wrong, and I’ll pull in the class readings to back it up and make
Ace In The Hole: The bottom line of humanity
Paper but Junkai Ling.
Moral Ambiguity and Antiheroes is the theme I choose to focus on In this paper. I will
choose the movie “Ace In the Hole” (Billy Wilder, 1951) to analyze and discuss this theme. The character of the morally ambiguous protagonist in film noir is usually a person with a special professional status,he may be a detective or a journalist, but regardless of the occupation setting, the morally ambiguous protagonist in film noir will have one thing in common, that is, unemployment and poverty. Poverty in life and dissatisfaction in the workplace make a person with deep desires become greedy in the face of easy benefits, so as to make unethical actions. At the same time, his heart will suffer from this, but also become eager to get benefits, and finally self-destruct under the double oppression. In the film “Ace In the Hole 1951”, director Billy Wilder created the character of an unemployed journalist named Chuck for “an irresponsible, hard-boiled journalist”(The Observer 2013). the theme of the film is that opportunist journalist Chuck deceives people and victims trapped In a cave for profit, challenging traditional notions of heroism,