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The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Warner Brothers had already filmed this book twice and botched it, so they gave it to a first time director.

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[icon:CLOCK] Runtime | 101 minutes
[icon:STAR] Director | John Huston
[icon:CHART] Budget | $300,000
[icon:FIRE] Cinematography | Arthur Edeson

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Sam Spade · The Maltese Falcon · 1941]
The stuff that dreams are made of.

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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.

:JOURNEY
Watching The Maltese Falcon
2 Retained
3 Killed
4 Negotiated
4 Circling
5 Scraped
5 Chosen

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George Raft turned down Sam Spade because he did not want to work with an untried director, which is how Bogart stopped playing gangsters and became a lead.

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Huston storyboarded every shot in advance and shot the film in eight weeks and under budget, a discipline that let a first timer get away with lighting this severe.

:LINK
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033870/
The Maltese Falcon on IMDb: full cast and crew