Awesome / The Maltese Falcon (1941)

• Spade revealing to Brigid that he and Archer never believed her story about her sister with Thursby. Spade knew something was up from the $200 she paid them, and realized this was a possibility.
  • Then, when Brigid tries to charm Spade to covering for her from the police, Spade didn't let his attraction or interest in her blind him. He refused to defend her thinking she was using him.
  Spade: You won't need much of anybody's help. You're good. It's chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get in your voice when you say things like 'Be generous, Mr. Spade.'
  Brigid: I deserve that. But the lie was in the way I said it. Not at all in what I said. It's my own fault if you can't believe me now.
  Spade: (smiling and grinning) Now you are dangerous.
• Spade's one-upping of the villains. The guy always keeps his cool. For example, when Spade quickly and easily disarms the hotheaded gunman, Wilmer, taking his pistols. He later ridicules Wilmer about it, claiming that "A crippled newsie took them from him. I made him give them back."
  • Before that, there was his first encounter with Joel Cairo. Cairo heard about the death of Sam's partner, Miles, and felt pity for him. He decided to ask for his help to find a black bird statue. Suddenly, he holds up a gun to Spade and threatened to shoot him if he got in the way of him searching Spade's office. Then, when Cairo checks to see if Spade's armed, Spade turns the tables on him, disarms him, and knocks him out with a punch.
  • Even when he pretends to lose his temper on Kasper Gutmam/The Fat Man his still manages to somehow be smooth about it.
    • You have to give Mr. Gutman some credit as well. He isn't the least bit scared of him, and during Spade's second meeting with Gutman, he secretly used a knockout drug, and managed to outsmart and drug Sam Spade.
  • Just the fact the Sam's able to avoid falling into the usual Femme Fatale trope and see through Brigid's lying nature. Sam takes his job as a detective extremely seriously.
  • Then there's the final confrontation between him and Brigid. After the criminal trio left the room, Sam called the police on them. Then he had a climatic final confrontation with the lying woman and got her to spill the beans about Miles' murder as pictured above.
• Captain Jacobi managed to survive a ship fire that Wilmer accidentally set, was shot several times by him, managed to knock him down as he made his escape, and somehow still limped to Spade's office before dying. All of this is except the last one is shown off-screen, although considering how far he got is quite a feat.
• Spade was all kinds of awesome all throughout the movie, particularly in this speech at the end:
  Spade: When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's— it's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.
• Gutman appears to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown when he finds out the Falcon is a fake. He collects himself after a few moments, starts chuckling and admires the Russian's gambit and is determined to carry on the search.

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