The Cinematheque

Pop culture artefact. Film noir prototype. Classic Hollywood high point. John Huston’s directorial debut. And Humphrey Bogart, in his first top-billed role, establishing the now-legendary Bogie persona: the snarling, cynical, self-reliant anti-hero whose tough-guy exterior masks the bittersweet romantic (and perhaps even sentimental) soul underneath. Bogart is ​“Spade, Sam Spade,” a San Francisco private-eye caught up in a deadly web of deceit involving a motley assortment of unscrupulous characters (Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr.) and the search for a missing statuette. Has there been a better screen adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s deliciously hard-boiled detective fiction?