Gregory, Ross. America 1941: A Nation at the Crossroads. New York: The Free Press, 1989.

The Maltese Falcon is in many ways a film about feeling unsure, used, and confused.  The viewer, as well as the protagonist, is thrown into a convoluted story, and is not sure who to trust, or even what exactly is happening.  That this movie was released in 1941 becomes very important, then, as America itself was caught at a very difficult time, and had to ask itself many of the same questions Sam Spade found himself facing.  In 1941 America, while trying to decide whether or not to go to war, needed to figure out exactly what was happening with the war, and when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941, the Americans learned that they too did not know who to trust.  Because The Maltese Falcon came at such a confusing time for the American nation, this book becomes germane in determining how the confusion portrayed in the movie relates to that felt by the American people.

The book is rather straight-forward, but the most interesting chapter in relation to the movie comes right at the beginning.  The author discusses how, for at least a year before America joined the war, a feeling of war pervaded the nation.  He briefly mentions films at the time, and states that an increase in films with military themes was clearly able to be seen.  He also mentions that theaters usually showed newsreels about the war before their feature films.  This information could be very useful to one studying The Maltese Falcon, since it serves as a reminder that contemporary viewers of the movie would have just been confronted with images of war.  The discomfort caused by these aggressive videos would probably have served to magnify the unease caused by the movie.

The rest of the book vacillates between discussions about what was happening militarily and how the American people felt during this period.  In relation to the movie it is clearly only the second topic that bears interest, as it can further enlighten the reader as to the climate into which this movie was released.

Green, Harvey. The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

The Maltese Falcon, which was made in 1941, was made at the beginning of the film noir movement. This movement, it is sometimes said, came out of the attitude of the American people, who had just experienced a World War and a depression, and who were just entering a second deadly war. This view is supported in The Maltese Falcon, a movie where the protagonist doesn’t always choose the right action, and even the ending does not tie up all the loose ends.

The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945 details the disquieting feelings that abounded throughout America during this time period. One terrifying aspect of this book is that it does not need to focus on World War One to show how harsh life could be in pre-depression America. Green, in fact, decides to almost completely avoid talking about The Great War, and focuses on other harsh circumstances such as working conditions, the Palmer raids (against people deemed politically radical), and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.

This chapter is followed by one about the stock market crash, and how it negatively impacted the entire nation. Green discusses why the crash happened, and explains just how people were effected by it, even long after recovery measures were put into place. He then talks about how Roosevelt was able to right the economy, but ends by telling the reader how shaken and wary the American public felt after such a debilitating period of time.

The rest of the book holds very little for people trying to relate national feelings to The Maltese Falcon, or to film noir in general. Green begins by talking about how hard it was for many people to obtain houses before 1945, but his last chapters focus on leisure time and what life was like for families that could provide for themselves.