First-time director John Huston took an ambitious approach to The Maltese Falcon. After all, the black bird isn't just a treasure that falls in your lap; you have to work for it. And you have to do the same for a great movie.

Huston storyboarded the entire movie, like Hitchcock did for the Oscar-winning Rebecca the year before. Huston also made use of clever camera angles and long, unbroken takes, a technique that remains innovative even today, when movies contain so many cuts they resemble the visuals you get on a roller coaster.

The most striking example of this is the scene in which Gutman drugs Spade. It's filmed in a way to trick the viewer—who sees the scene through Spade's point-of-view—and catch them off-guard when Spade takes a drink, his vision turns blurry, and he falls over. But watching the scene again, you wonder how you could have missed all the clues—the talking about alcohol, the filling of the glass, etc.

Huston trusts his viewers to be intelligent and he doesn't rely on close-ups to explain every little bit of the action. Huston also filmed the movie in chronological order, allowing the actors to develop their characters during the course of filming and maybe make the complicated plot easier to follow.