Is it important to the story? Yes! Does the audience need to care about it? No! That's a MacGuffin!
This month we're celebrating one of film's great narrative devices -- coined by screenwriter Angus MacPhail and popularized by Alfred Hitchcock -- and we're kicking it off with one of the best examples of all time!
Pop culture artifact. Film noir prototype. John Huston’s directorial debut. And Humphrey Bogart, in his first top-billed role, establishing the now-legendary Bogie persona: the snarling, cynical, self-reliant anti-hero whose tough-guy exterior masks the bittersweet romantic soul underneath.
Bogart is “Spade, Sam Spade,” a San Francisco private-eye caught up in a deadly web of deceit involving a motley assortment of unscrupulous characters (Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre) who will lie, double cross and murder to obtain a small, jewel-encrusted statue known as (MacGuffin Alert!) The Maltese Falcon.
Based on Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel!