25 Greatest Warner Bros Movies Ever

The Maltese Falcon isn't just a great film, it is an absolute treasure, particularly given how unfortunately easy it seems to have been for a lot of Warner Bros' earlier films to be lost forever.

It's fitting that it should immediately follow Casablanca in this run-down, for it made an indelible impression on that movie. It set up Humphrey Bogard's career rise thanks to his iconic performance as the brilliant Sam Spade, it starred both Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet and it had the courage to be mean.

Actually, The Maltese Falcon is incredibly mean: judged to be the first film noir, it features mean men, vicious women and a general moral murk that only the rich black shadows are darker than. It's about the theatre of conversation, of how dialogue can be a weapon to spar with and the pleasure is still much more in what they say and how they say it rather than why or the stark punctuations of violence around it.