Where Noir Starts

John Huston's solution to Hammett was to stop adapting and start transcribing. He went through the novel scene by scene, kept the dialogue almost intact and shot it in tight interiors with low ceilings and hard shadows, and the result reads as the first fully formed film noir. Everybody in it is lying with total professional courtesy. Bogart's Sam Spade is not a hero who has been corrupted, he is a man running a business in which loyalty is a service you pay for, and the film's famous ending works because he keeps the only promise he ever actually made. Sydney Greenstreet, appearing in his first film at sixty one, sits down and talks for ten minutes at a stretch, and the picture never once feels like it has stopped moving.