Gregory, Ross. America 1941: A Nation at the Crossroads. New York: The Free Press, 1989.

The Maltese Falcon is in many ways a film about feeling unsure, used, and confused.  The viewer, as well as the protagonist, is thrown into a convoluted story, and is not sure who to trust, or even what exactly is happening.  That this movie was released in 1941 becomes very important, then, as America itself was caught at a very difficult time, and had to ask itself many of the same questions Sam Spade found himself facing.  In 1941 America, while trying to decide whether or not to go to war, needed to figure out exactly what was happening with the war, and when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941, the Americans learned that they too did not know who to trust.  Because The Maltese Falcon came at such a confusing time for the American nation, this book becomes germane in determining how the confusion portrayed in the movie relates to that felt by the American people.

The book is rather straight-forward, but the most interesting chapter in relation to the movie comes right at the beginning.  The author discusses how, for at least a year before America joined the war, a feeling of war pervaded the nation.  He briefly mentions films at the time, and states that an increase in films with military themes was clearly able to be seen.  He also mentions that theaters usually showed newsreels about the war before their feature films.  This information could be very useful to one studying The Maltese Falcon, since it serves as a reminder that contemporary viewers of the movie would have just been confronted with images of war.  The discomfort caused by these aggressive videos would probably have served to magnify the unease caused by the movie.

The rest of the book vacillates between discussions about what was happening militarily and how the American people felt during this period.  In relation to the movie it is clearly only the second topic that bears interest, as it can further enlighten the reader as to the climate into which this movie was released.