The Maltese Falcon (1941 film) The Maltese Falcon (1941 film) The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 film noir written and directed by John Huston in his directorial debut, and based on Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel of the same name. The film stars Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade and Mary Astor as his "femme fatale" client. Gladys George, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet co-star, with Greenstreet appearing in his film debut. The story follows a San Francisco private detective and his dealings with three unscrupulous adventurers, all of whom are competing to obtain a jewel-encrusted falcon statuette. The film premiered on October 3, 1941,
Maltese language included in both the "Thesaurus Polyglottus" (1603) and "Propugnaculum Europae" (1606) of Hieronymus Megiser, who had visited Malta in 1588–89; Domenico Magri gave the etymologies of some Maltese words in his "Hierolexicon, sive sacrum dictionarium" (1677). An early manuscript dictionary, "Dizionario Italiano e Maltese", was discovered in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome in the 1980s, together with a grammar, the "Regole per la Lingua Maltese", attributed to a French Knight named Thezan. The first systematic lexicon is that of Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius de Soldanis, who also wrote the first systematic grammar of the language and proposed a standard orthography.