Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

passages which clearly show how Hammett developed this, making stylistic elisions part of
the whole mystery that embodies character, ultimately what goes on in Spade’s mind:
A telephone bell rang in darkness. When it had rung three times bedsprings
creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a
carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said:
“Hello…. Yes, speaking…. Dead?
Our attention is much more focussed on the actions and objects, as we get no
information whatsoever about the way Spade has reacted to his partner’s death. We are the
ones (consciously or not) outlining the character’s subjectivity, and making the
connections between the actions, objects, and the character’s feelings and attitudes. This
style was soon brought into other noir productions, by virtue of the professional ability of
film directors and cinematographers to use the appropriate lighting, as I show later. An
illustration that reveals the state of mind of the main character / protagonist through elision
is the moment when Spade is rolling his cigarette on learning about Archer’s murder:
Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured
quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay
equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s
inner edge down and up under the other edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs
and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked
the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and
thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and
lifting the other to Spade’s mouth. (Hammett 1992:10-11)
This long caricature-like sentence serves the purpose of omitting any clear and direct
reference to Spade’s feelings, but through contextual reading or watching this elaborate
process typical of mechanisation, one gets to know Hammett’s narrative style (more in
terms of an illusion of objectivity), at a metonymic level, in which Spade’s motives and
feelings are usually kept unknown to us, like something mechanised.
The Maltese Falcon was made into movies in 1931, when it was retitled Dangerous
Lady; in 1936, the new version was entitled Satan Met a Lady; and again in 1941, which is
the one John Huston adapted and directed and which has become a classic of modern
popular American culture. In Huston’s writing and Bogart’s performance we find the
emerging noir elements of the film as these two brought the hard-boiled detective to the
screen. Some critics have actually highlighted the textbook camerawork as deeply
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