Major Characters:
Sam Spade adult male, in his 30s, tall, with "yellow-grey" eyes, thick brows, a hooked nose, and pale brown hair growing down from a point on his forehead -- "....like a blond satan."
Joel Cairo adult male, possibly homosexual or bisexual, small-boned, shorter than Spade, black hair, wears lots of jewelry and cologne.
Ethnicity: Joel Cairo is described as "Levantine" and carries a Greek passport.
The noir films that focus on Los Angeles or San Francisco are also Orientalist, as they tend to emphasize and demonize their Asian collectives and locales. From the hideaway of D.O.A. 's Persian Majak . . ., West Coast noir takes us on an Orientalist tour that includes Geiger's Asian opium den in The Big Sleep , the apartment of noir's first homosexual Hong Kong-based and Istanbul-bound family in The Maltese Falcon , or to the similarly marked beach house of Jules Amthor in Murder, My Sweet , who is looking for his jewels (which happen to be Chinese). In West Coast noir, the West is a threshold to the racialized East, and the sexually perverse Chinatown is often the portal.
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While Oliver and Trigo attribute evil of the East "in parts: as jewels" and other objects, the name "Cairo" has rendered the character a metonym, an embodiment of the Orient. The part that is an Oriental and the whole that is the Orient are wedded. Any ornament or physical feature, however small, on Cairo 's person, comes to crystallize the East. Fastidiously, decadently dressed, with his less than manly posture, his exotic, alluring perfume, Cairo resembles a castrated Charlie Chan, a feminized homosexual.
A Touch of Yellow in Film Noir
[note: apologies to Sheng-mei Ma, could not locate your contact information.]
Edward Said’s “Orientalism revisited”
In 1539 the Knights Templar of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels. But pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token, and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day.
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As Greenstreet inspects the bird, turning it around and around, he grows frantic, produces a penknife, and begins to cut away the black enamel. He cuts faster and faster, carving in a frenzy but finds no jewels encrusted in the falcon’s body, finally shouting, “It’s a fake...it’s a phony...it’s lead...it’s lead...it’s a fake.”
Lot 268, Egyptian basalt statue of the falcon Horus, Late Period, Dynasty XXX, 380-343 B.C., 20 1/8 inches high
For lovers of the movie, "The Maltese Falcon," Lot 268, shown above, is a must. An Egyptian basalt statue of the falcon Horus, Late Period, Dynasty XXX, 380-343 B.C., this 20 1/8-inch-high statue is highly stylized and impressively large and in fine condition apart from a few surface abrasions. It has quite a smooth finish and the falcon's head is exceptional for its fine modeling and incised markings. Even for less obsessed collectors than the one depicted by the great Sydney Greenstreet in the movie, this is the ultimate "collectible," the type of piece that by itself makes a "collection."
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Crowley said it was revealed to him during his 1904 vacation with his wife Rose in the Boulaq neighborhood of Cairo, Egypt, by the audible dictation of a spiritual being called Aiwass, who was both the messenger of the new deities set over this æon and Crowley's own Holy Guardian Angel. In a series of trance visions, Rose indicated a number of symbols related to the Egyptian god Horus, according to the system Crowley had gotten and augmented from the Golden Dawn. She pointed out Stele 666 in the Boulaq Museum, which has since come to have a meaning in Thelemic mythology as an alternate form of the Book of the Law. Following Rose's instructions, he went to one of their rented rooms at an arranged time and took an hour of dictation from an unseen voice on each of three successive days.
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The trinity of the Book of the Law or Liber AL is composed of three reinterpreted Egyptian deities. First is Nuit (Nut), the goddess of the night sky, closely linked in Egyptian religion with Hathor, also known as the Egyptian Venus. Her message is of freedom, love and the mystical bliss of union, as expressed in the curious equation 0=2. Nuit reveals the Law of Thelema and declares that the æons have turned in the Equinox of the Gods. She is represented imagistically as space and the stars of space. Nuit has been interpreted as the space-time continuum, or as the infinite potential containing all things real and unreal.
Second is Hadit (Heru-Behdeti or Horus of Edfu), the winged solar globe, symbol of divine authority. This form of the Egyptian god Horus, originally local to Bedheti, had influence throughout ancient Egypt. Hadit symbolizes the secret individuality within each of us, the star that each person is, the invisible, ineffable and unmanifest divine spark which moves each of us on our self-appointed path of will. As such Hadit also represents the underworld, the infinitely small point, the capacity for knowledge, the partner of Nuit, and the fiery nature of underworld deities such as Blake's Los, the Greek Hekate and Hades, and the Christian Lucifer. Their aspect of wrathfulness is often interpreted as a form of great energy usable for many purposes. Themes of kingship are central to the message of Hadit.
Third in the trinity is the child produced by the union of Nuit and Hadit, the lord of the new æon, alternately expressed by two different forms of Horus. One form is Ra-Hoor-Khuit (Ra-Horakhty), a military aspect of Horus as conqueror and warrior. Ra-Hoor-Khuit extends the inwardly-turned energy of Hadit outwards into the world. Whether the urgings to war and violence found in the third chapter of the Book of the Law, and to a lesser extent in the second chapter, are meant as metaphorical magical formulae of fiery energy, or are actual exhortations to conquer on the plane of political and temporal power, or both, is a controversial issue. Many Thelemites find any literal interpretation of the warlike material repugnant, while others embrace it as a necessary part of the world's transition to the new æon.
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