The Stuff (Bad) Dreams are Made Of

The phrase "Maltese Falcon" either sounds awesome or laughable. It either sounds like the most mysterious thing in the world…or it sounds like the name of a college fraternity's ultimate Frisbee team. And the characters in The Maltese Falcon are similarly divided on whether to cheer or jeer at the idea of the black bird: when Spade tells Effie the plot, she says, "The part about the bird is thrilling," and Spade responds, "Or ridiculous."

When you get right down to it, the Falcon itself is a little bit of both. It's a solid gold statue encrusted with jewels hiding under a coat of black enamel. Gutman is willing to pay huge sums of money for it because he knows he can receive even more in exchange.
The Falcon's backstory is long and convoluted, involving Knights Templar, Charles V of Spain, and a tribute made of jewels. It also doesn't matter one bit. The backstory adds to the "thrilling" part of the story, but in actuality, it's ridiculous.

Because this is a movie, lots of suspense is built around the Falcon. Captain Jacoby staggers, wounded, into the office holding the Falcon bundled in newspaper. After so much talk about the Falcon, it's the first time the bird appears on screen. Or does it? Spade looks inside the newspaper-wrapping, but the camera doesn't show us what's inside, keeping us in suspense.

We don't see the Falcon until almost the end of the movie. The film runs 1 hour and 41 minutes, and we see the Falcon around 1 hour 27 minutes, barely ten minutes before the credits. The newspaper is torn from the bird like a sort of striptease, and Gutman caresses his treasure with his (figuratively) greasy paws.

And then, when he chips at it with a knife, the whole thing turns out to be fake. There is a real Falcon out there…somewhere…but this isn't it. It's a MacGuffin. The characters think they're transporting the Falcon, but it's really the Falcon that's carrying them…and bringing them all together for the film's finale.

In what's probably the movie's most famous line, Spade refers to the falcon-shaped lump of lead as "the stuff dreams are made of." For a hardened gumshoe, Spade sure knows his Bard—he's quoting The Tempest.

Prospero, the main character/magical overlord in The Tempest, has just given a masque (or theater production) when he realizes that he has—whoops!—forgotten about a plot to kill him. So he gives a little monologue before going to stop that whole "killing him" thing, which includes these (depressing) lines:

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.151-157)

Yeesh. Prospero is basically saying "Nothing lasts. We're all gonna die."

And when Sam Spade says that the Maltese Falcon is "the stuff that dreams are made of," he's alluding to the fact that it's insubstantial (it's worthless, after all) and to the fact that everywhere the Maltese Falcon goes, death follows it.