Private eye Sam Spade and his partner are approached by O'Shaughnessy to follow a man. During the tail Spade's partner is murdered and Spade becomes embroiled with O'Shaughnessy, Cairo and Gutman - three ruthless characters seeking the lost "Maltese Falcon", a statuette of a bird, currently black but believed to be solid gold and jewelled beneath this veneer.

The Huston version, exemplifies the noir aesthetic both thematically and visually. At the end of the film the hero Sam Spade (Bogart) realizes that O'Shaughnessy, who hired him and with whom he has fallen in love, is responsible for his partner's death. He must make the moral decision between turning her in, or running away with her. Typically for the Noir period film the hero eventually makes the moral decision. Visually, as she is being led away, the woman enters an elevator, and the grate closing in front of her face symbolizes her jailing. In the novel Spade also gives up O'Shaughnessy, but in a more hard-boiled manner - it is a choice between which of them will be jailed for murder and Spade is aware they will hang him but not O'Shaughnessy.