The Sheila Variations

Today in history: November 26, 1942

Casablanca premiered at the Hollywood Theatre in New York City.

It was not expected to be a long-lasting mythical evocation of the quintessential American ideals we all aspire to, from generation to generation. It was just supposed to be another one of the pro-war propaganda movies the studios were churning out at that time. It went on to win the Academy Award the next year - but again, lots of films win Academy Awards and don't go on to achieve legendary status.

The legend around the film began growing in the late 50s, a couple of years after Bogart's death. The stories about the Casablanca showings at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge Massachusetts are now famous ... and make me wish for a time machine.

Aljean Harmetz, author of Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II, explains:

Humphrey Bogart died in 1957. The cult of Casablanca was born three months later. If Cyrus Harvey, Jr., was not the father of the phenomenon, he was certainly the midwife. In 1953, Harvey and Bryant Haliday had turned the Brattle Theatre across from, Harvard University into an art cinema. Harvey, who had spent much of his Fulbright scholarship year in Paris watching movies at Henri Langlois's Cinemathique Francaise, programmed the Brattle with European classics and the early films of Fellini, Antonini, Truffaut, and Ingmar Bergman, for whom Harvey and Halliday became the American distributors.

"At some point, we thought that we ought to bring in some of the American films that hadn't been shown that much," says Harvey. "And my partner and I both thought that the Bogarts were vastly underrated. I think Casablanca was the first one we played. It was my favorite. I thought that Bogart was probably the best American actor who ever lived. And the picture caught on very rapidly. The first time we played it, there was a wonderful reaction. Then the second, third, fourth and fifth times it took off. The audience began to chant the lines. It was more than just going to the movies. It was sort of partaking in a ritual."

Casablanca played at the Brattle for the first time on April 21, 1957. It was so successful with Harvard students that it was held over for a second week. Then the Bogart festivals began, with six or eight of his mopvies playing each semester during final-examination weeks. The festivals would culminate with Casablanca. It was at Harvard that the relevance of Casablanca to a generation that had no relationship to World War II became apparent.

So. Happy birthday to a film that has done so much to shape how we think about ourselves. It has meant different things to different generations - and that's the definition of a good piece of art. If you watch a lot of the other WWII movies made at that time - they seem dated, overblown, propagandistic, and overly simplistic. Not this one. Not this one.

I have a feeling (just a hunch) that if Ilse had not gotten on that plane with Victor - if she had stayed with Rick ... the movie would not be remembered today. It might be still watched, on late-night movie channels, but it would not have taken on that mythical quality. It is the vision of self-sacrifice that taps into our deepest held beliefs and hopes. It is who we hope and aspire to be. It is a noble outlook ... and yet, at the center of the film, is the Rick character, who says he is not good at being noble. If you make a big deal out of your own nobility, then you are just a jackass who thinks way too highly of yourself. But if you quietly, and with no fanfare, do the right thing - abdicate your own wants for a greater cause, practice the art of letting go ... then you truly deserve to be called noble.

Hokey? Sure. Sentimental? Absolutely.

If you're a fan of this movie - enjoy the quotes below!

Billy Wilder says:

"This is the most wonderful claptrap that was ever put on the screen ... Claptrap that you can't get out of your mind. The set was crummy. By God, I've seen Mr. Greenstreet sit in that same wicker chair in fifty pictures before and after, and I knew the parrots that were there. But it worked. It worked absolutely divinely. No matter how sophisticated you are and it's on television and you've seen it 500 times, you turn it on."

Sociologist Todd Gitlin writes:

Casablanca dramatizes archetypes. The main one is the imperative to move from disengagement and cynicism to commitment. The question is why Casablanca does this more effectively than other films. Several other Bogart films of the same period -- Passage to Marseilles, To Have and Have Not, Key Largo -- enact exactly the same conversation. But the Rick character does not simply go from disengagement to engagement but from bitter and truculent denial of his past to a recovery and reignotion of the past. And that is very moving, particularly because it is also associated with Oedipal drama. But there is also a third myth narrative, a story about coming to terms with the past. Rick had this wonderful romance; he also had his passionate commitment. It seems gone forever. But you can get it back. That is a very powerful mythic story, because everybody has lost something, and the past it, by definition, something people have lost. This film enables people to feel that they have redeemed the past and recovered it, and yet without nostalgia. Rick doesn't want to be back in Paris. And the plot is brilliantly constructed so that these three myths are not three separate tales, but one story with three myths rushing down the same channel.

Aljean Harmetz, author of Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II writes:

I was in elementary school during World War II; I did my part in the war by rolling tinfoil and rubber bands into balls and bringing them to the Warners Beverly Theatre on Saturday mornings. World War II had receded with all its certainties and moral imperatives, leaving muddy flats behind. The world is a cornucopia of grays. I believed the romantic interpretation of Casablanca then -- love lost for the good of the world -- and believe it now. But it is the very ambiguity of Casablanca that keeps it current. Part of what draws moviegoers to the movie again and again is their uncertainty about what the movie is saying at the end ...

Casablanca's potent blend of romance and idealism -- a little corny and mixed with music and the good clean ache of sacrifice and chased down with a double slug of melodrama -- is available at the corner video store, but Casablanca couldn't be made today. There is too much talk and not enough action. There are too many characters too densely packed, and the plot spins in a hard-to-catch-your-balance circular way instead of walking a straight line. There is no Humphrey Bogart to allow the audience a permissible romance without feeling sappy. And the studio would insist that all the ambiguity be written out in the second draft.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

"Bogart had competence," says Billy Wilder. "You felt that, if that big theatre where you were watching Casablanca caught on fire, Bogart could save you. Gable had that same competence and, nowadays, Mr. Clint Eastwood." But Gable is too heroic for a disillusioned world. Three decades after his death, Bogart still seems modern. "He wore no rose-colored glasses," wrote Mary Astor. "There was something about it all that made him contemptuous and bitter. He related to people as though they had no clothes on -- and no skin, for that matter."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Of the seventy-five actors and actresses who had bit parts and larger roles in Casablanca, almost all were immigrants of one kind or another. Of the fourteen who were given screen credit, only Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page were born in America. Some had come for private reasons. Ingrid Bergman, who would lodge comfortably in half a dozen countries and half a dozen languages, once said that she was a flyttfagel, one of Sweden's migratory birds. Some, including Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains, wanted richer careers. But at least two dozen were refugees from the stain that was spreading across Europe. There were a dozen Germans and Austrians, nearly as many French, the Hungarians SZ Sakall and Peter Lorre, and a handful of Italians.

"If you think of Casablanca and think of all those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents, the picture wouldn't have had anything like the color and tone it had," says Pauline Kael.

Dan Seymour remembers looking up during the singing of the Marseillaise and discovering that half of his fellow actors were crying. "I suddenly realized that they were all real refugees," says Seymour.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Bogart and Rains admired each other, and that admiration comes through their scenes together. What seems to be a genuine friendship between Rick and Renault takes the sting out of the ending of Casablanca. "My father loved Humphrey Bogart," says Jessica Rains. "He told me so." The cockney who turned himself into a gentleman was unexpectedly compatible with the gentle-born son of a doctor and a famous illustrator who turned himself into a rowdy. "Professional" is the word the people they worked with pin, like a badge, to both men. "Bogart never missed a cue," says script supervisor Meta Carpenter. "He was completely professional." Rains, says assistant director Lee Katz, "was very professional altogether." To the Warner hairdressers, said Jean Burt, Bogart and Bette Davis were "the real pros. They were on time; they knew their lines; they knew their craft."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

[During shooting] Bogart was snappish and moody. Love scenes were uncharted waters for him. "I've always gotten out of my scrapes in front of the camera with a handy little black automatic," he told a journalist who visited the Casablanca set during production. "It's a lead pipe cinch. But this. Well, this leaves me a bit baffled." The interview is typically frothy and insubstantial as Bogart plays with the idea of becoming a sophisticated lover or a caveman lover. But, even as he jokes about it, his uneasiness is obvious. "I'm not up on this love stuff and don't know just what to do."

According to a memoir by Bogart's friend Bathaniel Benchley, before Casablanca began shooting, a mutal friend, Mel Baker, advised Bogart to stand still and make Bergman come to him in the love scenees. Bogart appears to have taken the advice, but his reticence may have been as much innate as calculated. Nearly a dozen years after Casablanca, Bogart told a biographer that love scenes still embarrassed him. "I have a personal phobia maybe because I don't do it very well," he said.

"What the women liked about Bogey, I think," said Bette Davis, "was that when he did love scenes he held back -- like many men do -- and they understood that." Miscast as an Irish horse trainer in Dark Victory, Bogart had tried to make love to Davis, who played his rich employer. Said Davis, "Up until Betty Bacall I think Bogey was really embarrassed doing love scenes, and that came over as a certain reticence. With her he let go, and it was great. She matched his insolence."

However distant Bogart and Bergman may have been from each other in real life, and however uneasy Bogart may have been with Bergman in his arms, their love scenes have the poignancy and passion that Hollywood calls chemistry. "I honestly can't explain it," says Pauline Kael, "but Bogart had that particular chemistry with ladylike women. He had it with Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen and he so conspicuously had it with Lauren Bacall -- who pretended to be a tough girl but really wasn't -- in To Have and Have Not. But he didn't have it with floozy-type girls."

Critic Stanley Kauffmann explains the match between Bogart and Bergman as the resonance of a relationship between brash America and cultured Europe. "She was like a rose," he says. "You could almost smell the fragrance of her in the picture, and you could feel his whiskers when you looked at the screen. It was intangible."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Of the stars, Bergman had the more difficult job. Bogart had only to play a man in love. Foreshadowing without giving away too much, Bergman had to let the audience know that love wasn't enough.

ILSA. And I hate this war so much. Oh, it's a crazy world. Anything can happen. If you shouldn't get away, I mean, if something should happen to keep us apart. Wherever they put you and wherever I'll be, I want you to know that I -- Kiss me! Kiss me as though it were the last time.

And Bergman had to hold the audience even when she was saying dialogue that was so richly romantic that it was almost a parody, including, "Was that cannon fire? Or was it my heart pounding?"

Her voice and her face could make almost anything believable. In 1947, several top sound men agreed that Bergman had the sexiest voice of any actress. "The middle register of her voice is rich and vibrant, which gives it a wonderfully disturbing quality," said Francis Scheid. "It's sexy in a refined, high-minded way." "The face is quite amazing," says Pauline Kael. "I think she had a physical awkwardness on the stage and in her early films, but I think somehow that the beauty of her face obviated it. Even in Casablanca, her physical movements are not very expressive. But you didn't really care."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Casablanca started on Stage 12A with the flashback to Rick and Ilsa's romance in Paris. It was an accident that Bogart was required to make love to Bergman almost before he was introduced to her. Originally, production was to start in Rick's Cafe on Stage 8, but the intricate clockwork that matched actors, scripts, stages, and sets had been thrown off because Irving Rapper was two weeks behind schedule on Now, Voyager. Claude Rains didn't finish his role as the wise psychiatrist in Now, Voyager until June 3. Paul Henreid was not free until June 25. So the [Michael] Curtiz movie began with the scene in the Montmartre cafe. The first day, a lovestruck Richard Blaine -- "His manner is wry but not the bitter wryness we have seen in Casablanca" say the stage directions -- pours champagne for himself, Ilsa, and Sam while the Germans march toward Paris and Sam plays, "As Time Goes By".

According to Geraldine Fitzgerald, Bogart and Bergman had lunch together a week or ten days before Casablanca started production. "I had lunch with them," she says. "And the whole subject at lunch was how they could get out of the movie. They thought the dialogue was ridiculous and the situations were unbelievable. And Ingrid was terribly upset because she said she had to portray the most beautiful woman in Europe, and no one would ever believe that. It was curious how upset she was by it. 'I look like a milkmaid,' she said.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

"I remember," says film critic Pauline Kael, "my friends and I talked about when are the executives going to discover this guy [Humphrey Bogart]. It was early in his career, when he appeared in horror movies and all sorts of stuff that Warners threw at him. We liked him years before he got the leading roles. he was small, but he knew how to use every part of himself. By the late thirties, he was quite in charge of everything in his performance. He had a tension, like a coiled spring. You didn't want to take your eyes off him."

In The Maltese Falcon, as Dashiell Hammett's detective Sam Spade, Bogart carried to the right side of the law the wary watchfulness, the cynicism, and the ambiguities that had infused his deadliest killers. "I think it was his very best performance," says Kael, who was twenty years old in 1941 when she saw the movie for the first time. "Because you got a sense of the ambivalances in th eman, and he used all the tensions marvelously physically. I don't think he could have been as good as he was in Casablanca if he hadn't done the Falcon first, because he really discovered his powers in the Falcon. he created more tension in his scenes than he ever had before. And I think afterwards he drew on the qualities he had discovered in himself in the Falcon. So I think it was [John] Huston who brfought those things out. And [Michael] Curtiz benefited from them."...

The arc of Bogart's career at Warner Brothers can be seen in how and when he chose to fight Warner -- and with what success. Bogart was suspended for refusing to play the part of the outlaw Cole Younger in Bad Men of Missouri ... His suspension ended in June 1941, when George Raft, whose career decisions at Warners were unerringly wrong, refused The Maltese Falcon because "it is not an important picture." And what would have happened if Raft had agreed to play Sam Spade? The odds are high that Bogart would have made a breakthrough in some other movie. The disillusionment, stoicism, and weary aloofness that he brought to the screen fit the heroes of a new kind of movie melodrama, film noir, too well to have gone unnoticed ...

Warner Brothers could overuse and misuse its actors. It could dump Van Johnson and Susan Peters in 1942 and let MGM build their careers. But the studio would not have remained in business if it had missed the obvious. The Maltese Falcon had been immensely profitable, and George Raft was becoming more difficult with every role he was offered. In January 1942, Bogart demanded $3,000 a week and the right to do ten guest radio appearances a year. He was given a new contract, starting at $2,750 a week. After six years at Warners, Bogart finally had a star's contract. Warner Brothers was stuck with him for seven years, and the studio began to look for a role that would turn him into a romantic lead.

On February 14, [Hal] Wallis sent a memo to Steve Trilling: "Will you please figure on Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan for Casablanca, which is scheduled to start the latter part of April." Six weeks later, Jack Warner wrote Wallis that George Raft was lobbying him for the role. Wallis held firm and Casablanca had the first of its three stars.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Much of the major work on the Casablanca screenplay was done between April 6, when Howard Koch was assigned to the movie, and June 1, when a revised final script was mimeographed ...

Each subsequent script for Casablanca became leaner and sharper, more economical, the scenes rearranged for greater dramatic effect and the speeches polished and clipped. Within the confines of a studio that both Koch and Julie Epstein describe as 'a family", Koch rewrote the Epsteins to give the movie more weight and significance, and the Epsteins then rewrote Koch to erase his most ponderous symbols and to lighten his earnestness.

This kind of survival-of-the-fittest script is unlikely to happen today, when writers, director, and studio executives come insecurely and suspiciously together to make a single movie, the original writer is rarely brought back after his work is rewritten, and screen credit means that someone gets extra money from television and videocassette sales...

At the beginning of May, the Epsteins finished the second section of the script of Casablanca, while Howard Koch turned in his revision of the Epsteins' first act. Earlier, in nineteen pages of suggestions of "Suggestions for Revised Story", Koch had warned:

There is also a danger that Rick's sacrifice in the end will seem theatrical and phony unless, early in the story, we suggest the side of his nature that makes his final decision in character. It would be interesting to have Renault penetrate the mystery in his first scene with Rick when he guesses that the cynical American is underneath, a sentimentalist. Rick laughs at the idea, then Renault produces his record -- "ran guns to Ethiopia", "fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish War." Rick says he got well paid on both occasions. Renault replies that the winning side would have paid him better. Strange that he always happens to be on the side of the underdog. Rick dismisses the implication, but throughout the picture we see evidences of his humanity, which he does his best to cover up.

Koch's script of May 11 also deepened Rick's character and underlined the political tensions in subtle ways. For example, Koch makes the man Rick bars from his gambling room -- who was an English cad in the play -- into a representative of the Deutschebank. When the owner of the Blue Parrot offers to buy Rick's Cafe, Koch has added dialogue in which the character played by Sidney Greenstreet also offers to buy Sam, and Rick says, "I don't buy or sell human beings." (In their rewrite of Koch's script, the Epsteins would build on Koch's line by having Greenstreet respond, "That's too bad. That's Casablanca's leading commodity.") If Koch layered the politics rather heavily -- in his version, Victor Laszlo forces Renault to toast liberte, egalite, fraternite -- the Epsteins would remove those speeches in the script of June 1. With delicate balance, Koch managed to hold down the gags while the Epsteins managed to cut out the preaching.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

In the Epsteins' first script, Lois is still Lois and Renault's womanizing still has an unpleasant edge. However, the groundwork has been laid for the relationship between Rick and Renault, which may lie as close to the emotional heart of the film as the relationship between Rick and Ilsa. The Epsteins have created a bantering between equals, an admiration at the edges of the frame.

RENAULT. I have often speculated on why you do not return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the President's wife? I should like to think you killed a man. It is the romantic in me.

RICK. It was a combination of all three.

RENAULT. And what in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

RICK. My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

RENAULT. Waters? What waters? We are in the desert.

RICK. I was misinformed.

Says Epstein today: "My brother and I tried very hard to come up with a reason why Rick couldn't return to America. But nothing seemed right. We finally decided not to give a reason at all."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

The sixty-six pages of script, labeled Part I TEMP., were mimeographed on April 2. The Epsteins had written the first third of the movie, the section preceding the flashback to Rick and Ilsa's Paris romance. Ilsa and her Resistance-hero husband had come to Casablanca, and at the end of the Epsteins' script, Rick was sprawled drunkenly in his empty cafe, waiting for her to return.

"That first part was very close to the play," Epstein says. "It was with the second half that we had trouble."

Those sixty-six pages mirror the final movie. The Epsteins even begin with a spinning globe, an animated map, and a description of the refugee trail that leads to Casablanca. Everybody Comes to Rick's took place inside Rick's Cafe, and Rick was the first character to be introduced. The Epsteins start by creating the feel of Casablanca: A man whose papers have expired is short by the police; a pickpocket warns his victims that vultures are everywhere; refugees look up longingly as an airplane brings the Gestapo captain (a few scripts later he was promoted to major) Strasser to Casablanca and lands beyond a neon sign that reads RICK'S. Inside the cafe, a dozen desperate refugees try to buy or sell their way to freedom. Rick is not introduced until page 15, when a hand writes "Okay -- Rick" on the back of a check and the camera pulls back to a medium shot of Humphrey Bogart. And the plot is driven by an invention of the Epsteins: the Letters of Transit were being carried by two German couriers who have been murdererd.

Of the four major characters in Everybody Comes to Rick's, only the noble Victor Laszlo remains essentially the same in the movie. Rick, who in the play is a self-pitying married lawyer who has cheated on his wife, takes on Bogart's persona of wary, hooded toughness. Says Jules Epstein: "Once we knew that Bogart was going to play the role, we felt he was so right for it that we didn't have to do anything special. Except we tried to make him as cynical as possible."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

However, there was no mistaking the fact that Casablanca, with its snappy dialogue, eccentric characters, witty cynicism, wary anti-hero and liberal political message was definitely a Warner movie. Casablanca is a less raw and angry melodrama than the studio might have made a few years earlier, but it has the same distrust of authority and suspicion of human nature. America's entry into the war was already softening movies by requiring them to throb with patriotism, but the milieu of Casablanca is still corrupt, and the little people still don't get a fair shake.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Bogart's response to the success of Casablanca was more typically sardonic. He enjoyed telling his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, how Charles Enfield, the studio's head of publicity, had had the amazing revelation that the actor had sex appeal. Says Bacall, "Bogie would say, 'Of course, I did nothing in Casablanca that I hadn't done in twenty movies before that, and suddenly they discover I'm sexy. Any time that Ingrid Bergman looks at a man, he has sex appeal.'"

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Warner Brothers was the most frugal of the studios, and little was wasted there in 1942. World War II gave the studio's president, Harry Warner, an excuse to pick up nails dropped by careless carpenters. But he had obsessively picked up nails before the war made iron scarce. Casablanca moved onto the French Street created for The Desert Song the day after that film moved off. A few signs and two live parrots turned the French Morocco of heroic freedom fighter El Khobar into the French Morocco of heroic freedom fighter Victor Laszlo. And half a dozen bit players with foreign accents got a full week's work by straddling the two films. More than half of the movies Warners made in 1942 dealt in one way or another with the war, a bonanza for actors who had fled from Berlin or Vienna. Casablanca was filled with those Jewish refugees, many of them playing Nazis.

Film critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote:

"Bogart absolutely encapsulates permissible romance. In this disillusioned, disenchanted world here was a romantic hero we could accept. I think that that disenchantment began with World War I and the emergence of what could be called the Hemingway -- the undeluded -- generation. And I think that that revulsion with the romances and the lies of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century has persisted. There have been plenty of representatives of the lovely bucolic strain of American life on the screen. Bogart was someone urban -- in a sense more jagged and abrasive than Cagney -- who you felt was suffering. Cagney was triumphant. Bogart was tough, but he had sensitivity. Certainly the epitome he stood for was in Casablanca. I was misinformed. That's the twentieth century."

Roger Ebert - who provides the commentary to the DVD (and I highly suggest you check it out, if you haven't already - it's marvelous commentary, true goosebump material from someone who has STUDIED and also LOVED this movie since it first came out) - wrote the following article about Casablanca for his "Great Movies" series:

If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that ``Casablanca'' is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.

No one making ``Casablanca'' thought they were making a great movie. It was simply another Warner Bros. release. It was an ``A list'' picture, to be sure (Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars, and no better cast of supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warners lot than Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson). But it was made on a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the film had been, and would be, in dozens of other films made under similar circumstances, and the greatness of ``Casablanca'' was largely the result of happy chance.

The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.

Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in ``The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,'' convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In ``Casablanca,'' he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.

The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wisecracks with epigrams. We see that Rick moves easily in a corrupt world. ``What is your nationality?'' the German Strasser asks him, and he replies, ``I'm a drunkard.'' His personal code: ``I stick my neck out for nobody.''

Then ``of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.'' It is Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman Rick loved years earlier in Paris. Under the shadow of the German occupation, he arranged their escape, and believes she abandoned him--left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their tickets to freedom. Now she is with Victor Laszlo (Henreid), a legendary hero of the French Resistance.

All this is handled with great economy in a handful of shots that still, after many viewings, have the power to move me emotionally as few scenes ever have. The bar's piano player, Sam (Wilson), a friend of theirs in Paris, is startled to see her. She asks him to play the song that she and Rick made their own, ``As Time Goes By.'' He is reluctant, but he does, and Rick comes striding angrily out of the back room (``I thought I told you never to play that song!''). Then he sees Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord marks their closeups, and the scene plays out in resentment, regret and the memory of a love that was real. (This scene is not as strong on a first viewing as on subsequent viewings, because the first time you see the movie you don't yet know the story of Rick and Ilsa in Paris; indeed, the more you see it the more the whole film gains resonance.)

The plot, a trifle to hang the emotions on, involves letters of passage that will allow two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal and freedom. Rick obtained the letters from the wheedling little black-marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The sudden reappearance of Ilsa reopens all of his old wounds, and breaks his carefully cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When he hears her story, he realizes she has always loved him. But now she is with Laszlo. Rick wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence that combines suspense, romance and comedy as they have rarely been brought together on the screen, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo escape together, while he and his friend the police chief (Claude Rains) get away with murder. (``Round up the usual suspects.'')

What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa--to place a higher value on Laszlo's fight against Nazism--remember Forster's famous comment, ``If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.''

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the ``happy'' ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (``it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world''). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

In her closeups during this scene, Bergman's face reflects confusing emotions. And well she might have been confused, since neither she nor anyone else on the film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane. Bergman played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.

Stylistically, the film is not so much brilliant as absolutely sound, rock-solid in its use of Hollywood studio craftsmanship. The director, Michael Curtiz, and the writers (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) all won Oscars. One of their key contributions was to show us that Rick, Ilsa and the others lived in a complex time and place. The richness of the supporting characters (Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, Lorre as the sniveling cheat, Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief and minor characters like the young girl who will do anything to help her husband) set the moral stage for the decisions of the major characters. When this plot was remade in 1990 as ``Havana,'' Hollywood practices required all the big scenes to feature the big stars (Robert Redford and Lena Olin) and the film suffered as a result; out of context, they were more lovers than heroes.

Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of ``Casablanca'' is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans.

To Have and Have Not: atmosphere

This is a continuation of my post about Only Angels Have Wings and the rich atmosphere set up in the first 10 minutes.

Now in To Have and Have Not, another Hawks movie, we're in Martinique. The hotel, the bars, the streets, the casinos in Martinique ... it's the same old Warner Brother's "tropical" set you've seen in a million different movies. There are a couple of shots (where the shootout happens in the bar) where you could swear you were watching Casablanca, especially because there's Humphrey Bogart and Marcel Dalio (who played the croupier in Casablanca) - and while there is no Sydney Greenstreet, you still watch thinking: hmmm. This looks AWFULLY familiar. It even starts with the image of a map - although there are no trailing lines of refugees like in Casablanca. But still. Same opening device. Same bar with stairway up the side like at Rick's, same upstairs hallway, same columned foyers where shootouts happen. Same bullshit ceiling fans, random "natives", swaggering sailors, Venetian blinds ... and it's fake fake fake. It's delightful! True make-believe. These guys, these directors, were masters. They were all directing films using the same damn sets ... and you even recognize some of the extras ... but it's the atmosphere created that is distinct. They just knew how to set up scenes and moments ... so that the entire place breathes to life. We KNOW we are not looking at Martinique, but who the hell cares about Martinique? It's not a documentary. Howard Hawks always filled his screen with action ... the random woman dancing by herself in the crowded bar, the drummer sitting back and then deciding he wants to join in the music, the people standing bellyup to the bar ... it doesn't matter that it was the same bar in a million other movies. Because it's the story that is paramount. Story story story. Who cares if you have a custom-made bar, or who cares if you travel to Martinique to film on location if the movie itself is shit? I don't mean to set this up as an either/or kind of conversation, because "either/or" usually isn't my game. It's just that when I look at To Have and Have Not, and I watch the same fake bunches of bananas go by that I saw in a million other movies, when I see that there is barely a pretense of making the bars look any different from the bar in Casablanca ... and when I realize that it doesn't matter ... I am a happy happy viewer. Keep it simple. Keep it simple. Hawks knew how to do that like nobody's business.

The Books: "Bogart" (A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Bogart, by A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax

Now this is what I call a biography! I am not sure why it took so long for Bogart to get his due, but I suppose that's the way. After all, I'm still waiting for a good biography of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, just to name a few. Sometimes it takes a generation or so to re-discover someone, the narrative about that person changes. Perhaps during their lifetime they were well regarded but their star faded ... and there's then a re-discovery process. Or perhaps during their lifetime they were NOT all that well regarded and it is only with time that we, the public, can see just what a giant impact they had. Bogart was a huge star during his lifetime, but in the 60s his star faded a bit - with the advent of the "new Hollywood" ... he was seen as part of the old guard, perhaps ... not "cool". To cinephiles and movie buffs, of course, he was always important and beloved. In the late 50s, the famous Brattle Theatre, a movie house in Cambridge Massachusetts, started a tradition of showing Bogart films during final exams - a tradition that, I believe, continues today. Students, eager to escape the stress of finals, would show up for double-features, dressed as Bogart, they would chant the lines of Casablanca or Maltese Falcon in unison, keeping the flame alive, even after he had passed away. There was always a certain cult-ish feeling about loving Bogart. He did not have the movie star glitter of, say, Cary Grant - whose status could never be denied, not when he was alive, not when he was dead. It's not that Bogart was an acquired taste. It's just that his films, even years after they came out, somehow avoided quaintness, or kitschiness. And Bogart embodied a type of man who was growing unpopular at that time, in the full height of the Beat movement, the bohemians, the start of the folk music coffee house culture, and Flower Power. Bogart, in his tie, trench coat and fedora, would have sneered at such silliness, perhaps, but would never have shown "the kids today" any contempt (unlike some of his contemporaries). There was a staunch individuality at work in Bogart that tapped into something at the time ... it was a throwback, sure ... a look at simpler days (not better, just simpler) ... and it was refreshing. Every young man hopes that, in the moment when it counts, he will be able to behave as selflessly as Rick did in Casablanca. In that moment on the runway in Casablanca, he embodies what we most hope for ourselves, he shows us how we would so like to behave, if given the chance. Things like honor and self-sacrifice are never out of fashion.

Roger Ebert writes, in his review of Casablanca:

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the ``happy'' ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (``it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world''). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

It totally makes sense that if you want to let off some steam during finals week, you would be hard pressed to find a better activity than going to watch Maltese Falcon with your stressed-out classmates. Because Bogart can show you how to be strong, how to suck it up, how to do the right thing, even if it hurts like hell.

I'm talking about him as an actor now - the parts he played - not the man himself. The line is often blurred. Bogart the man was hardly a self-sacrificial uninvolved wry-grin type of guy. Those were PARTS that he played, and brilliantly - but they were PARTS. The fact that we all are so convinced that that is who he was (a man we do not know) is just a testament to his talent. In reality, there were deep wounds in Bogart, deep insecurities - about his relationships with women, about his looks, about his standing at the studio (his contract was never up to par with his peers - he was very much taken for granted and taken advantage of on that score) ... and the fact that he could so step into these cool guys, the guys who don't lose it - but the guys who, you know, deep down, feel deeply and feel things forever (he plays characters with long LONG memories ... "The Germans wore grey, you wore blue ...") just shows how good he was, as an actor. He shows that you can feel things that deeply without sacrificing manliness - that is one of Bogart's greatest assets. That you can be sexy and smouldering - even when you have a lisp and you are a good FOOT shorter than your leading lady ... gives us all hope. If you want to see a completely rare side of Bogart - and one that I feel is closest to his actual character - I cannot recommend Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place enough. I reviewed it here. It is Bogart's best performance, in my opinion, and he revealed things in that movie that he had never revealed before and was never asked to reveal again. It is ugly. An excruciating performance. Full of insecurity, rage, envy ... and quiet smouldering bitterness. I believe that that performance is not as well-known because it messes with our idea of the "Bogart persona (tm)" - and it mucks up his mythical status as the tough guy willing to do good in a world that will not congratulate him. In In a Lonely Place, he also plays an outsider - like all of his great parts - but as we watch the film, we slowly realize that there is a REASON this guy is an outsider, and it's not just because the world doesn't appreciate him, and he's awesome and everyone else sucks ... It's because the guy is a douchebag, a coil so tightly sprung that he is the kind of guy you slowly back away from at a party, because you don't want to be trapped by him. He's the kind of guy that you, as a woman, hope you don't date ... because he will never ever let you go, and he will become creepy at the first sign of trouble. It's a brilliant performance, completely under-praised, I think - nearly forgotten. What a shame. See it!

He was a complex bag, Bogart. An actor I truly love.

Sperber and Lax have pulled out all the stops in this massive book. It is an exhaustively researched TOME ... and in it is everything about Bogart you would want to know. There will be more books written, of course, but they will have to reference this one. No stone is left unturned. It's not all that elegantly written, and it relies heavily on cliches in the language - but I'm in it for the information. It is a giant important biography, and a book I recommend for any film-lover's library.

The excerpt below has to do with the filming of Casablanca. And so, to prepare us ... here is the first shot (besides his hand signing the bill "OK - Rick", I mean) we get of Bogart in the film.

Iconic.

EXCERPT FROM Bogart, by A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax

The lines of dialogue now so familiar trickled in during the weeks of rewrites: "I told you not to play that song!" ... "Here's looking at you, kid" ... "If you do, you'll regret it, maybe not tomorrow" ... "Of all the gin joints in all the towns all over the world, she walks into mine." To the members of the company, it became a daily ritual of learning, discarding and relearning pages, and tempers - Bogart's included - frayed to the breaking point.

His part was the longest, his load of constantly changing dialogue the heaviest, and the cool demeanor of the early weeks gave way to testiness. Bergman recalled him returning from lunch hour breaks spent arguing with Wallis. There were also arguments with Curtiz, although disagreements with the talented but temperamental Hungarian were unavoidable on even the smoothest-running films. Curtiz stomped about in riding boots and ran his set like an autocrat, his demeanor seesawing between marzipan charm and outbursts of temper in obscenity-laced broken English. This was their fourth picture together - the last had been Virginia City in 1940 - but the first in which Bogart played the lead. He was more assertive now than when his name had been below the title. "Bogie was certainly short of patience with Mike," Lee Katz said. There were, however, "no pyrotechnics". Bogart just quietly bristled, at times turning and walking off to make his point. Before Leonid Kinsky's first scene as Sascha the bartender, played one-on-one with Bogart, Curtize was overwhelming the Russian actor with minute instructions when "Bogie just looked at him and said, 'Please, shut up. You can't tell Leonid what to do.' And that was that."

Katz was a Curtiz assistant going back to 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn. "Mike drove most of his actors crazy. He was from the European school - full of dolly shots and twisting cameras and what have you, very complex on camera moves. So he had a habit, usually, of watching the camera more than the actor. And the actor would realize it." Five years earlier, during Kid Galahad, Bette Davis had stopped in mid-scene and snapped at Curtiz: "Mike! Watch me! Stop watching the camera!"

But Curtiz was a master craftsman whose broad range can be seen in two of the films he made in 1942: the brilliant musical biography Yankee Doodle Dandy and the melodramatic Casablanca. He was particularly strong as an action director, and his simple lesson to a younger colleague of how to stage a mob scene with only twenty extras is a classic. Put ten on each side, he said, and then have them run across - "They'll make such a mess!" From his days as a silent-film director he also knew when words were superfluous and how to convey character with a look, a lift of an eyebrow, a nod.

A nod made, according to the screenplay directions, "almost imperceptibly" by Rick is a turning point in Casablanca. It signals the orchestra to play "La Marseillaise" and the start of an ensemble scene in which Rick's singing refugee patrons, their backs straight in reclaimed dignity, drown out the German soldiers singing "The Watch On the Rhine." Although it is Henreid, as Victor Lazslo, who commands the cafe orchestra to play the anthem, it is Rick's silent assent they wait for.

The stirring sequence is unmarked by a single line of dialogue, and it marks the hero's return to the battle. "Do it with a full scoring orchestra," Wallis told music director Leo Forbstein, "and get some body to it." The scene was an emotional moment for the company, many of whom had relatives in the concentration camps or dead in the gas chambers. Madeleine LeBeau, who played the layabout Yvonne, had fled France with Marcel Dalio, whose mother was still in Paris, hiding in a basement as Jews were rounded up. Dan Seymour stood at the back, watching the crowd. "I could see their faces. They were crying" A close-up fixed on LeBeau, her voice heard above the rest of the singing. The displaced citizens of 1942 were singing the hymn of the citizens of 1792 and another German invasion. The original script directed the German officers in Rick's to sing "The Horst Wessel Song", the anthem of the Nazi party, but "Horst Wessel" was under copyright, and copyright infringement - wars and Nazis notwithstanding - was still a violation of international agreement. Such an infringement, Warner lawyers said, might possibly endanger export of the film in such neutral countries as Argentina, where pro-German sympathies ran high.

In mid-July, seven weeks into the shooting and with only two scheduled weeks remaining, the basic problems in the script were still unresolved. At one point the latest scenario sent out the night before was recalled the next morning by J.L. himself, amid sharp differences about the story's outcome. Every writer favored keeping the ending of play, in which case Rick would lose Ilsa; but the studio wanted the conclusion dictated by Hollywood convention. "Conferences were taking place all over," Howard Kock said, "arguing about it, with the studio pretty heavily on the side of, We've got Bergman, we've got Bogart, why aren't they going to be together?" The only principal who didn't much care one way or the other, Julius Epstein said, was Bogart, who was only "worried that he wouldn't get to the boat on weekends."

There were only problems: Even if Ilsa did leave with Laszlo, how did they get her to go? Have her turn and run? Not convincing. Lois Meredith had been virtually dragged away. Casey Robinson's brainchild was a quick clip to the jaw, immobilizing the heroine, and then moving her out. But what happened to Rick? Was he arrested?

"Toward the end," Epstein said, "there was chaos - no ending, no knowing what was happening." Bergman appealed to Koch, "How can I play the love scene when I don't know which one I'm going off with?" Curtiz, Koch added, wore a hangdog look and was openly worried. "He kept wanting to talk about it. You could see it in his expression." He took his frustrations out on the actors. After one outbreak too many, the gentle Kinsky started to walk off the set, swearing never to come back. Curtiz, for once, was immediately apologetic. "We have no ending for the picture," he said, by way of explanation. "Everyone is nervous."

On July 17, with production almost a week behind schedule, the cast assembled for the airport scene. Stage 1 was enveloped in a fog created by what Warner Publicity would describe as "more than half a million cubic feet of vaporized oil." (Because wartime security precluded outdoor location shots at night, it took innumerable requests, meetings, and red tape to be able to film the one inserted shot of plane motors revving up.) In the background on the soundstage, a painted cardboard cutout, creatively lit, served as the plane to Lisbon. "The outline of the Transport plane is barely visible. Near its open door stands a small group of people." Actually, it was a group of small people; midgets from Central Casting gathered on the runway to provide the proper scale.

Everyone's nerves were in tatters. "Rick is not just solving a love triangle," Robinson argued to Wallis in a memo. "He is forcing the girl to live up to the idealism of her nature, forcing her to carry on with the work that in these days is far more important than the love of two [but the problems of three] little people." Rick became the deus ex machina, setting all things right: "You're getting on that plane with Victor."

The whole scene depended on Bogart's delivery. It was a four-page monologue with brief interruptions, rewritten for the third time in three weeks and shoved at him the night before to memorize. For Bogart, who learned his lines mornings on the set because he couldn't concentrate at home, it was a double burden, and the last traces of his patience gave way.

The disagreements surfaced over lunch, the specifics vague after half a century. Bogart had one idea of how to play the scene, Curtiz another. Warner publicist Bob William watched as "they wound up shouting at each other - but Curtiz was the kind of guy you would shout at anyway." Unit manager Al Alleborn reported "arguments with Curtiz the director and Bogart the actor." After two hours Alleborn, in desperation, roused Hal Wallis from his bungalow and brought him back to be the peacemaker. An hour later, the disputes broke out again. Only then, Alleborn recorded, did the parties "finally decid[e] on how to do the scene." The lost time was entered on the production report as "Story conference between Mr. Curtiz and Mr. Bogart."

When the cameras did roll, the magic was back:

"You're saying this only to make me go." "I'm saying it because it's true ... You belong with Victor ... If that plane leaves the ground and you're not on it, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life ... I'm not good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world ... Here's looking at you, kid."

It was time for the suspension of reality, no questions asked, including the one of how Bogart had managed to put on a belted trench coat while presumably keeping his gun on Rains. Wallis and Koch had solved the problem of getting Bergman away by having Henreid step into the picture - "Are you ready, Ilsa?" But it was the lovers' scene, and it remains the benchmark for renunciation.

Bogart, Huston once said of him, wasn't especially impressive face-to-face; but when the camera rolled, something happened, an almost noble quality took over. The takes of Rick and Ilsa's farewell required several days. Bogart concentrated on Bergman's shining face, his dark eyes made darker still by the black-and-white photography. Arthur Edeson's lighting emphasized the still-boyish profile, and what emerged on the screen was intensity, energy, and magnetism - the requisites of a great movie actor.

_______

Bogart finished August 1, the others two days later. There had been a few remaining scenes to shoot and some retakes. Wallis asked Bogart for "a little more guts ... more of the curt hard way of speaking we have associated with Rick. Now that the girl is gone, I would like to see [him] revert." Rick's fate following Strasser's death was resolved with Renault's laconic, "Round up the usual suspects." According to the Epsteins, the line had just come to them in a car one night as they rolled along Sunset Boulevard.

Still, it was hard to let go, and it took outside forces to wrap the film. On August 3, two days past the new projected closing date, Bergman, called to the telephone, let out a shriek. For Whom the Bell Tolls was definitely hers and Paramount wanted her on location immediately - that night if possible. Warners was already well over the limit of her commitment. Wallis pleaded for another two days, but Al Alleborn had a better idea. Stop the picture. Tonight. Look at the assembled footage and find out if retakes were really necessary. Wallis agreed, and Casablanca was closed out.

The final fade-out, however, remained in question. Rick's closing rejoinder to Renault would be recorded in a sound studio as a wild line and later inserted into the soundtrack as the two men walk off into the fog. Long after the close of production, Wallis, dissatisfied with every suggestion, dithered over various versions, one of them being, "Louis, I might have known you'd mix your patriotism with a little larceny." He was intent on just the right punch line and on August 21, he finally had it: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

With all the talented writers working on the script, it was the producer who came up with the line. "That's Hal Wallis," Casey Robinson said years later. "He wrote that line, and it was marvelous. It was inspired."

It was Wallis, too, who decided on the documentary-style opening - the spinning globe and the black track of the refugee trail dissolving into a montage of masses on the move; the narration was modeled on the popular news series The March of Time and spoken by a radio announcer from the Warner Station KFWB. The overall effect of tying the film romance to the larger sweep of world events had a payoff that no one could foresee.

The Books: "Humphrey Bogart" (Nathaniel Benchley)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Humphrey Bogart, by Nathaniel Benchley

Benchley and Bogart were friends, so this 1975 biography is not a critical study, not an objective look at Humphrey Bogart, but a loving portrait, at times too loving to hold my interest. I bought this book for the pictures it includes. It's out-of-print now, but I found a copy of it on a table outside a second-hand bookshop for 2 dollars, and bought it immediately. The photos are not your basic family snapshots, and stills from famous movies. The photos are woven throughout the book, some of them taking up entire pages, and many of them you probably have never seen before. They are marvelous photos, so this book could almost be considered a coffee-table book. Christmas cards sent by Humphrey Bogart and Mayo Methot - his notorious third wife (their relationship was so volatile they were known as "the battling Bogarts"), drunken blurry shots of the two of them making out and wrestling on the couch, early photos of Bogart in tennis whites - these are personal photographs, not "public domain" pictures compiled by a biographer. Benchley knew Bogart. He probably put his own photos throughout the book. Benchley is already a well-known writer, so the book is not bad - and it has that gift of knowing the right anecdote to choose to prove your point. It's chock-full of anecdotes. Many of them have now passed into myth/legend, whatever you want to call the Bogart mystique (his lisp and how he got it, the whole Gerber Baby rumor, and more) ... and it is not clear how much is true, how much is embellishment, or how much is just memory playing its tricks. It doesn't really matter, in the end, I suppose. There's something vaguely unsavory in a book like this - a friend trading on his relationship with a famous person - but since it's not a smear book (I'm looking at you, Christina Crawford), it doesn't quite fit into that category. It's a loving "here's what I remember" portrait, as well as a pretty damn thorough examination of Bogart's journey to the top: the roles he got, the reviews, the setbacks, the battles with the studio, and - most startlingly - how Bogart's persona changed. That's one of the most interesting things about him as an actor.

He became famous playing Duke Mantee, the villain in Petrified Forest - first on Broadway and then in the film. Leslie Howard, who had played his part on Broadway and was already a big star, said he would not do the film if Humphrey Bogart didn't reprise his role as well. Pretty damn generous, I would say (although his behavior as producer of the play was not quite as generous).

Humphrey Bogart as Duke Mantee

It is hard to overstate the sensation Bogart made on Broadway with this role - but that's the excerpt from Benchley's book I chose - so I'll let it speak for itself. It was not Bogart's debut. He had played small parts on Broadway before - but his reputation was as the youth sashaying into the parlor saying things like, "Tennis, anyone?" He played pampered prep-school boys. Fascinating. So he was not unknown to Broadway audiences, but nothing could prepare New York for what he did in Petrified Forest. Seems like a theme in Bogart's life - the shifting personality, the experimentation with what he was good at, what would "hit" an audience, the public's perception changing as he took on deeper and better parts ... Bogart saying, "Tennis, anyone?" ? Hard to imagine now.

But that's what I want to talk about: the development of Bogart's persona and how it changed. Petrified Forest launched him into the realm of serious Hollywood players. Duke Mantee was truly bad, a scowling hovering psychopath. He's riveting in the film. He seems like an emissary from the future - if you look at the way other "villains" were played at that time. Bogart is unredeemable, in the film, but you can't take your eyes off of him. He has a five o'clock shadow, another oddity - in a day when people appeared more cleancut in films, even poor people, bums ... Bogart worked hard on that part, creating him from the ground up - how he walked, how he talked, how he DIDN'T talk, body language, gesture, the costume ... Bogart owned that role. After Petrified Forest, he began to play villains. Let's count the times he was killed by Edward G. Robinson, shall we? He played sidekicks - like in The Roaring Twenties, with Cagney as the lead (I adore that film - the whole phrase "Don't bogart the joint" - while obviously referring to Bogart's ubiquitous hanging cigarette - also always seemed to me to have as its reference the scene in Roaring Twenties in the foxhole, when Bogart hogs the shared cigarette ... But let's move on) ... Bogart did not move on to play leads after Petrified Forest. He was second lead. He was a bad guy. He always died in the end. He was in movies with names like San Quentin, King of the Underworld, You Can't Get Away With Murder, Racket Busters, Crime School - typical Warner Brothers "ripped straight from the headlines" fare. He was shot in glorious 1920s style rooms, and would stagger to the couch, or fall down the stairs. He was a bootlegger, a conman, a thief. He was expendable. We might cry when Cagney died (as I always do, when I see his spectacular death scene in The Roaring Twenties - perhaps my favorite death scene of all time), but we didn't really care when Bogart died, because he seemed so immoral, so ... well, like he was asking for it. It's interesting to see all of those "in between" movies in the decade of the 30s, like Bullets or Ballots and others, when Bogart is playing second-banana. It makes me realize that his stardom, his giant mythic stardom, was NOT a done deal. It was not in the cards from the beginning. I mean, look at the guy. He was short, balding, with bad teeth, and a LISP, for God's sake. Is that a leading man?? Well, no, it wasn't. Not at first. He was not being groomed for that, and it was not what the public accepted him as. His Duke Mantee made such a huge impression that Bogart could have had a whole career, playing villains, and hypnotic bad guys ... but look at what happened. Look at how the career shifted! Amazing! It was subtle, but a couple of parts paved the way for Casablanca, which launched him as a leading man. In High Sierra, he plays Roy Earle, another villain - yet this time with the soft underbelly that is (and can be) so compelling to audiences. You rooted for him (in a way that you did NOT root for Duke Mantee). John Huston wrote the screenplay for that film - and - the same year was given a directing opportunity, his first, with The Maltese Falcon. Bogart, having already gotten to know Huston on High Sierra, decided to take a chance with the untried director (something Huston always appreciated) - and the result is historic. I think it's one of Bogart's best roles, and in it - we can see the other persona really start to be developed: the wry-faced cynical guy, with a deep mother-lode of strong moral character within (but it's never anything he'd want to be congratulated for - as a matter of fact, he'd rather you not notice it at all) - who ends up doing the right thing, even though it means he'll lose the girl. What a departure from Duke Mantee!! So exciting: I love to look at a career and see the fortuitous turns it takes - turns it didn't HAVE to take. It just as easily might NOT have happened. There are no guarantees. Bogart was not guaranteed to be a star and his journey is full of accidents, coincidences, and giant leaps of faith. I love it.

His Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon solidified his position as a valid leading man - despite the lisp and the balding nature of his head - and the roles he got after that in the next year - in Across the Pacific and Casablanca just dug him in deeper as one of the most interesting and compelling movie stars working at that time.

Later in his career, he could "experiment" again - in films like The Caine Mutiny and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and create characters on the verge of going mad, men so full of conviction, greed, paranoia, that they become unhinged from reality. He's terrific in those kinds of parts as well.

Nathaniel Benchley's book is just the tip of the iceberg, and as the years have passed, Bogart's reputation has just grown, so there are more books, more biographies, more critical studies.

But they sure don't have the awesome photos that THIS book has!

The excerpt below is about Bogart's playing of Duke Mantee on Broadway, and how - for one season - it became THE play to see. Kind of like Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens last year. That performance was an EVENT. It wasn't the play that was being hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread - it was her work in particular. That's what happened in 1935, when Bogart first stepped onto the stage as Duke Mantee in Petrified Forest.

Here's the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Humphrey Bogart, by Nathaniel Benchley

When Humphrey Bogart walked onstage as Duke Mantee there was a stir in the audience, an audible intake of breath. He was a criminal; he walked with a convict's shuffling gait, and his hands dangled in front of him as though held there by the memory of manacles. His voice was flat and his eyes were as cold as a snake's; he bore an eerie resemblance to John Dillinger, to whom killing a person meant no more than breaking a matchstick. Sherwood's summary of Mantee in the stage directions described Bogart perfectly: "He is well-built but stoop-sholudered, with a vaguely thoughtful, saturnine face. He is about thirty-five, and, if he hadn't elected to take up banditry, he might have been a fine leftfielder. There is, about him, one quality of resemblance to Alan Squier [the hero]: he too is unmistakably doomed."

The play opened at the Broadhurts Theatre on January 7, 1935, with Leslie Howard starring as Alan Squier and Peggy Conklin as Gabrielle Maple, the heroine. (For those interested in trivia, the part of Boze Hertzlinger, which had almost been Humphrey's, was played by a youth named Frank Milan.) The story, briefly, tells how Squier, a wandering intellectual, meets and befriends Gabrielle in an Arizona roadhouse, and sees in her some of the dreams he had once had as a youth. Mantee, fleeing the police, comes on the scene as the incarnation of ruthless violence, and makes hostages of everyone in the roadhouse. Squier signs over his life insurance to Gabrielle and then gets Mantee to shoot him, so that Gabrielle can have the money to go back to her mother's homeland in France. That is overcompression of the most radical sort, but any explanation short of printing the entire script would be of little help.

The critics threw their hats in the air. Brooks Atkinson wrote that "Robert Sherwood's new play is a peach ... a roaring Western melodrama ... Humphrey Bogart does the best work of his career as the motorized guerrilla," and Robert Garland said that "Humphrey Bogart is gangster Mantee to the tip of his sawed-off shotgun." The play, clearly, was in for a long run.

Humphrey had had one bad period in September, before rehearsals started, when his father died. Things had been getting progressively worse; Dr. and Mrs. Bogart had moved to Tudor City, and with the almost complete disappearance of his practice, he had taken up the periodic job of ship's doctor on cruise ships or small passenger liners. He died in the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled in New York, leaving approximately ten thousand dollars in debts, which Humphrey paid off out of his eventual earnings from The Petrified Forest. Humphrey had a deep affection for his father, and his death at this time, and in these circumstances, was a particularly jarring blow.

But once rehearsals were under way, he put everything else behind him and concentrated on becoming as convincing a gangster as possible. He walked, talked, and lived Duke Mantee; he wore a felt hat with the brim turned down, he talked out of the side of his mouth, and he built a set of mannerisms to go with the character. There are very few shows that don't have some sort of trouble or conflict prior to (and sometimes after) opening night, but Hopkins had chosen his cast well. A short, round, brown, slightly bowlegged little man, he quietly mesmerized the actors into doing what he wanted, and since in many instances he had intuitively cast them against type (as in Bogart's case) the results were often electric. He told them that he collected casts the way other people collect books, and that this was the perfect cast; there was not one person in it he'd think of changing.

Another case of the intuitive casting was that of Ester Leeming, who played a small part as Paula, the Mexican maid. When Hopkins picked her (a simple nod was his usual method of selection) Sherwood said to her, "It's lucky you can speak Spanish. The only Spanish I know is 'patio', and I learned that in Hollywood." As it turned out she couldn't speak Spanish, so she went to Berlitz and took a cram course untnil she could swear convincingly in the language - which she still can do to this day.

Their first night in front of an audience was in mid-December at the Parsons Theatre in Hartford, and there were two things that astonished the company. One was the amount of humor in the script - lines took on a new meaning, which they'd missed in rehearsal - and the other was the literal gasp that went up when Humphrey made his entrance. Dillinger was very much in the news at the time, having recently escaped from prison, and to some people it seemed that he had just walked onstage. The prison pallor, the two-day's beard, the gait, the mannerisms - everything about him was menacing, evil, and real. The company was to hear that gasp every night throughout the run, but the first one was the one they still remember. They went on to Boston, where they opened Christmas Eve, and then to New York in January. They played until June 29 of that year.

For two reasons, Humphrey disdained the use of makeup. The first was that the desired effect of prison pallor made makeup unnecessary, and the second was that to fake a two-days' beard would be obvious. His was his real beard, and he kept it trimmed during the week with electric clippers, thereby becoming one of the earlier electric shavers. After the Saturday night performance he would shave, singing and lathering himself and having a grand old time, and he would come into Miss Leeming's dressing room, which adjoined his, and spread his good cheer around with a lavish hand. She remembers him as being generally quiet and gentle, and scrupulous in his behavior to the female members of the cast - a trait that was by no means shared by the star.

The play could have run for a much longer time, but Howard grew weary of playing it. He had enough muscle with the producers (he was a coproducer with Gilbert Miller, in association with Hopkins) so that he could forbid anyone else to take his part, and also to prevent its going on the road. Warners had by this time bought it, and Howard announced that a road tour might hurt the box office for the picture. So they closed the end of June, while still doing booming business; Howard went home to England, and the others went looking for jobs. One of those who felt the disappointment most keenly was Howard's understudy, Kenneth MacKenna.

One of the good things Howard did, however, was to say that he would do the picture only if Bogart played Mantee, and he was as good as his word. Warners had Edward G. Robinson under contract, and saw no sense in using someone they'd already had a few unspectacular dealings with, so they blithely announced they were making the picture with Howard and Robinson, and with Bette Davis playing Gabrielle. Humphrey, understandably upset, cabled the news to Howard, and Howard cabled Warners that without Bogart he wouldn't play. They gave in, and Humphrey was signed to another Warner Brothers contract. His farewell to the stage was a summer of stock in Skowhegan, Maine, where he did such plays as Rain and Ceiling Zero while waiting for the shooting to begin on The Petrified Forest. He was a quick study and a perfectionist and he had each part letter-perfect, playing one while rehearing another.

The film version of Sherwood's play was remarkably similar to the original, with only a few obligatory outdoor shots and some tinkering with the dialogue to make the difference. (In the play, Gabrielle tells Squier: "My name is Gabrielle, but these ignorant bastards call me Gabby," a line which until recently would never be allowed on screen.) The screenplay was by Charles Kenyon and Delmer Davis and the director was Archie Mayo; of the original company, only Bogart and Howard and one minor player remained.

In Hollywood it is a truism that a person is as good as his last screen credit, and having scored as a gangster Humphrey was immediatley cast as another. The picture was Bullets or Ballots and Humphrey played a character named Nick "Bugs" Fenner, who in the last reel kills and is killed by a hard-boiled sleuth, played by Edward G. Robinson. In his first two years at Warners he made twelve pictures, in eight of which he was either a gangster or a criminal of some sort, and in four of which he was killed. In one he was sent to prison for life, and in one other he and Robinson repeated their double-killing routine. Exactly two, Marked Woman (with Bette Davis) and Dead End, were what might be called superior pictures, and one, Isle of Fury, was so bad that he pretended not to remember ever having made it.

The Books: "By Myself and Then Some" (Lauren Bacall)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

By Myself and Then Some, by Lauren Bacall

This is an expanded and updated version of Lauren Bacall's first autobiography By Myself (excerpt here). We've got more photos (some really great ones), more anecdotes, more detail ... I suppose as one gets older, one sometimes remembers more about the past. Whether or not it is all true and accurate and fact-checkable is not really relevant. Bacall goes deep into the past, remembering her childhood in New York in the 30s, the shoes, the cigarettes, the smells she remembers, conversations she had ... We have the same stories about meeting Bogart, only more detail. She incorporates material from her second autobiography Now (excerpt here) and then moves on to the present - with her comeback, starting with her Oscar nomination for her touching wonderful performance in the abysmal The Mirror Has Two Faces. She hadn't had a part like that in a long time. And to see her in that film, no makeup, unglamorous ... for a woman of that age, and that reputation ... it was something else. I thought she was terrific. She had always worked, although more in the theatre in the 70s and 80s than on screen - but suddenly, she was in hot properties again, things that got notice: Dogville, Birth ... She was seen on red carpets, she's BFF with Nicole Kidman. Good for Betty Bacall. Her "sunset" years have not been a descent into obscurity. She has just gotten more and more parts, which is rare indeed. By Myself and Then Some covers all of that.

I also love the pissed-off title. I relate to it. She's alone, she's lonely. She wishes for a mate. She divorced Jason Robards in 1969 and since then? She's quite open about her loneliness in all of her books, how she longs for that man beside her, someone to be her companion, helpmate, whatever. At the end of Now, she wonders if it will ever happen for her again, if she will ever find another man. 10 years later, she publishes a book called By Myself and Then Some. It makes me laugh. I know how you feel, Lauren. I really do.

While By Myself and Then Some is full of so many showbiz anecdotes that Hollywood-lore crack addicts like myself will be kept happy and satiated for years to come, I wanted to pick an excerpt from her early years, before she was famous. (I mean, she became an international sensation at age 19, so there's not much time to look at the non-famous years!) One of the reasons I love memoirs and biographies of famous actors is because of those "early years" sections. I love watching how they formulated their dreams for themselves. I love reading about any "A ha!" moments they might have had. I love watching the dawning of the passion that will rule their whole lives. It's also exciting to read about those moments when people realize: You know what? I'm GOOD at this!

Lauren Bacall was a skinny flat-chested teenager, living with her mother in New York. She went to dancing classes and singing classes, and did some modeling, although she never felt she was any good. It was acting that turned her on. She pounded the pavement. She worked as an usher in a Broadway theatre (and actually was so striking that she got a mention in a review of a play ... THAT'S star quality!), she sat around at lunch counters with other actors, hearing about auditions, running around town, reading for this part, that part. Again, Lauren Bacall didn't struggle for long. It was a magazine cover she nailed that got the attention of Hollywood and Howard Hawks in particular, and she never had to play a bit part in a movie (unlike Ms. Marilyn Monroe, and so many others) - she never had to suffer on the sidelines ... Hawks pushed right to center stage. Bacall's story is unique. So many people were put under personal contract and we never hear anything about them. So many of "Howard Hughes' girls" kept on retainer were just foolish teenagers who were a 1940s version of Coco from Fame (that awful scene). Lauren Bacall was picked by the right director at the right time. He did not squander her. He did not take advantage of her. He was very very careful in the first thing he put her in, and who he put her against (Bogart). And when his little creation began behaving in a way he did not approve (falling in love with Bogart), emotionally Howard Hawks cut off from her. He was DONE with her, very pissed off. An interesting Pygmalion relationship there. He felt he created her, and he felt that falling in love was a useless waste of her energy - she should be focusing on creating her mystique, remaining separate, working on her craft ... But to quote the end of What's Up, Doc: "Listen, kiddo, ya can't fight a tidal wave."

But I wanted to choose an excerpt today that was from Bacall's early years in New York, taking classes, modeling, hoping ... for something to happen to her.

Oh, and I also find it interesting (and she has spoken a lot about this) that she has terrible debilitating stage fright. She trembles uncontrollably. Her head shakes (she mentions becoming aware of it on her first day of shooting To Have and Have Not) ... her hand trembles ... it is beyond her control. The "tricks" she performs on herself, to just allow herself to be up there in front of people (head down, chin down, arm down ... ) - are extraordinary, I admire the smart-ness of her coping skills very much ... but lots of people have coping skills and don't become PHENOMS at the age of 19. Her "coping skills" (head down, chin down, look up while head is down so head doesn't shake, arm down, cross one arm over the other) - all of that stuff became her "look", her persona, what she was famous for.

Amazing! What began as a way to stop her head from shaking - became her "trademark". Bacall is smart. She's not just smart as an actress, but she has the other kind of smarts: smarts about herself. And the choices she made only made her seem stronger, more specific, more herself. None of those invented gestures come off as studied, or stiff. It looks like Lauren Bacall is just one cool dame, who doesn't NEED a lot of extraneous movement. When really it all began as a way to deal with nervousness. I love that!

Onward to the excerpt:

EXCERPT FROM By Myself and Then Some, by Lauren Bacall

I continued venting my energy on acting. At the end of the year, students of the New York School of the Theatre performed for parents. I had learned the portion scene from Romeo and Juliet. For weeks I studied it - during class, in school, on the street (why I wasn't hit by a truck I'll never know), at home. The day came and my moment with it. And the shaking started. I got through it, with Mother, Grandma, Charlie and Rosalie, Vera and Jack in attendance. It must have been awful - but what mattered was that I had done it, and that meant I would continue. No stopping me now.

My restlessness with regular school was due to the fact that I wanted to get on with real life - or away from real and on to pretend. I cut classes three times one week - once to go to the zoo, the other times for Bette Davis - and wrote a note saying I'd been ill and signed my mother's name. I always got to the morning mail first, but one morning I didn't. There was a letter from the principal's office saying I'd been out and they'd like to speak with Mother. What a scene! My tears - 'Oh, Mother, forgive me, I'll never do it again.' Mother asking how I'd got away with it. My confession to signing her name to a note. She: 'Don't you know that's against the law? That you can go to jail for that?' What was it in me - why and how was I able to do such things? For a girl who was dedicated to truth, it was most strange. Was it just mischief? Or was it a streak of my father - perish the thought! It reminded me of a time when I was about eleven. My friends and I used to walk through the five-and-ten-cent store. That's what it really was then, you could buy almost everything for five or ten cents. As I had no money, I used to look at all the appetizing items on the counters and imagine which I would buy. On one counter were pencil cases - cheap little pencil cases, but I'd never had one and I wanted one so badly. So badly that I took it. I suppose most kids have done something like that once in their lives - there's so much to see, to buy. And when you don't have the money, so much that is beyond your reach - even a silly pencil case. I went home as usual and Mother noticed the case. She took me by both arms, looked at me, and said, 'When did you get this pencil case?'

'I found it.' Eyes slightly off center.

'Where did you find it?'

'On the street, Mother.'

'You're lying, Betty. It's brand new. Now tell me where you got it.'

My chin trembled - I couldn't help it - I was caught, and frightened of what I had done. 'I took it from the five-and-ten,' in the smallest voice - a voice only birds could hear.

'Well, you are going right back there and return it. And when you return it you are to give it to the woman behind the counter, tell her that you took it, and apologize.'

'How can I ever do that? I'll be punished! Can't I just put it back on the counter and leave?'

'No - you do as I say. Let this be a lesson to you. Taking what isn't yours is stealing - it's against the law. If you return it now, they will do nothing to you.'

She walked with me to the store, went in with me, and quietly stood to one side while I made my confession. The woman took it back, and it was an experience I never forgot - nor was it ever followed by another like it. Facing a situation head on was the only way to deal with anything. I learned the lesson early. My mother gave me a solid foundation. Any little quirks along the way were my own. It was hard growing up. (It's still hard.)

I studied journalism at Julia Richman to fulfill a momentary dream of becoming a reporter. It must have been the result of a comic strip - that and seeing His Girl Friday. Years before when I saw a rerun of Loretta Young in The White Parade, saw how beautiful she was, how brave, how dedicated, I knew I would be a nurse. That is until my first sight of blood and the wave of nausea that accompanied it. The nursing dream became a thing of the past.

All this came from wanting so desperately to be someone - something; to have my own identity, my own place in life. The best thing about dreams is that youth holds on to them. I was always sure mine would come true - one of them, anyway. Clearly my fantasies resulted from my identification with movies and certain stars. Like the time I had seen Margaret Sullavan in a movie. She was a wonderful actress and I loved her looks. I wanted to look like that. My hair was long - it had been for years. Time for a change. But my mother and grandmother would be furious, so I pondered for days. Finally I decided I'd pondered enough. Time for action. I was to have my hair trimmed. Mother gave me the money. I took off for the shop. I was so excited - I'd leave 86th Street looking like me, I'd return looking like Margaret Sullavan. Thrilling. I sat in the barber chair and told the man what I wanted - I had a small photograph of Margaret Sullavan with me. He looked at me and said, 'Are you sure that's what you want?' 'I'm sure. Cut it all off.' He picked up his scissors and began. One side went and I looked cockeyed. It was awful, but it would be lovely when both sides were done. They finally were. I looked in the mirror. The hair was Margaret Sullavan, all right - very short, just below the ears, bangs - but the fact was still mine. The two definitely did not go together. But it was too late now, there was nothing for it but to go home and face the music. I walked in the door and when my grandmother saw me she gave a horrified scream, as did my mother. 'Are you crazy - cutting that beautiful hair? Whatever got into you?' 'All I wanted to do was look like Margaret Sullavan. I love it - I've had my long hair long enough. I'm not a baby anymore.' But it was awful - I looked hideous and I hated it. But it would grow back - I hoped. Fortunately, it did before I had finished high school. I was an awkward mess anyway, the hair just added to the picture.

Movies were accessible to me, of course - they were the cheapest entertainment form that I knew - twenty-five cents for entry. My exposure to the theatre was almost non-existent, as I could simply not afford it. I was given a very special treat in 1939 - seeing John Gielgud as Hamlet. The combination of John Gielgud, Shakespeare, and a Broadway theatre was almost too much for me. The feeling of walking into a legitimate theatre - the shape of it, the boxes, balconies, upholstered seats, and the curtain with the magical stage behind it. What seemed like thousands of people crowded inside. So this was what a real theatre was like! It lived up to every vision I had ever conjured up in my mind. I reached my seat, program clutched in hand. The house lights dimmed - the chatter ceased - the entire audience was focused on the stage - the hush - the feeling of awe - and the power actors have to affect people's lives while they sit in a theatre. At the rise of the curtain one could feel the expectation, the concentration of everyone in that house. What followed depended on what was given by the actors - they could do almost anything, they could lead an audience anywhere, make them feel anything. The power of it - it was unforgettable. That day I was transported for two and a half hours from my perch high in the balcony. Even the wave of applause that came at the end of each ac did not shake me back to reality. Would I ever come close? Was there any way for me to be anywhere near that good? Gielgud's performance was so affecting that, despite my youth and my inability to understand Shakespeare's language totally, I left the theatre in a complete daze, bumping into people, being stepped on, unaware of where I was. Since then, of course, I have realized that Gielgud's Hamlet was one of the great performances of all time. And I can still see the beauty of that head and his total immersion in his role. It took some time for me to return to my reality.

In A Lonely Place: Bogart's best performance

A post that made me happy to read. Good screenshots, snippets of dialogue ... It's a favorite of mine- not as well-known as i think it should be. I think it's Bogart's finest acting. Seriously - even with all the great roles - this one is the most pained and explosive ... He's fanTASTIc.

I wrote about In a Lonely Place here in one of my many unfinished blog-series: Under-rated Movies.

Other under-rated movies in my wee series:

This post covers 5: Ball of Fire, Only Angels Have Wings, Dogfight, Zero Effect and Manhattan Murder Mystery

Four Daughters

Searching For Bobby Fischer

Joe vs. the Volcano

Something's Gotta Give

Truly, Madly, Deeply

The Victor Laszlo - Rick Blaine dilemma

Open thread:

Talk about the ending of Casablanca. Talk about Ilsa's choice. Or actually - Rick made the choice for her: You will go with Laszlo. Ilsa loves both men. Not in the same way, but she does love both men, and she walks away from the "grand passion".

In my opinion, it is this very self-sacrificial feeling to the end of that movie that makes it a classic. If everyone had gotten what they wanted, (or - to put it another way: if Rick and Ilsa had gotten what they wanted) it just wouldn't have been as effective. The movie works because of that bittersweet wistful "what if" streak running through it.

Anyway: anyone who has anything to add to all of this: interpretations, additional thoughts, an analysis on HOW these two could POSSIBLY walk away from one another ... bring it on.

Rick:

vs.

Laszlo - in his finest moment:

Here's Ebert's review of the film.

Excerpts:

If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that ``Casablanca'' is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.

Yes. It is that unselfishness, the renouncing of the great love, that makes this film so effective. But still: so painful. Everyone pays a price in this scenario - everyone.

Here's another excerpt from Ebert to discuss:

What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa--to place a higher value on Laszlo's fight against Nazism--remember Forster's famous comment, ``If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.''

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the ``happy'' ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (``it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world''). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

Anyone have anything to add?

Welcome, people coming here from Ann Althouse! Feel free to add your thoughts in the comment thread about this film. It's a great discussion going on.

Pauline Kael: 5001 Movies: "The Big Sleep"

Ahhh. One of my favorite movies ever made. Obviously. I posted about it enough!

The Big Sleep 1946

Humphrey Bogart is Raymond Chandler's private eye in this witty, incredibly complicated thriller. You may not be able to figure out the plot even after the denouement (Chandler reported that while the film was in production, William Faulkner and the other screenwriters had to appeal to him for guidance, and apparently Chandelr couldn't exactly figure it out either), but it's the dialogue and the entertaining qualities of the individual sequences that make this movie. It takes place in the big city of displaced persons -- the night city, where sensation is all. The action is tense and fast, and the film catches the lurid Chandler atmosphere. The characters are a collection of sophisticated monsters -- blackmailers, pornographers, apathetic society girls (Lauren Bacall and Martha Vickers are a baffling pair of spoiled sisters; the latter sucks her thumb), drug addicts, nymphomaniacs (a brunette Dorothy Malone seduces the hero in what must surely be record time), murderers. All of them talk in innuendoes, as if that were a new stylization of the American language, but how reassuring it is to know what the second layer of meaning refers to. Howard Hawks directed -- and so well that you may even enjoy the fact that, as he says, "Neither the author, the writer, nor myself knew who had killed whom."

I never ever get tired of watching this movie. The script has to be one of the best scripts ever written. I love love this movie. And yes ... nobody knew who had done what. Not even Chandler, who wrote the thing. Classic.

One of my favorite scenes ever filmed is in The Big Sleep, and anyone who has seen it will know what I'm talking about when I say: "in the bookstore." I've watched this movie and gotten totally stuck on that bookstore scene, rewinding it over and over and over. It never gets old, and it never ceases to surprise.

God. Great movie.

Pauline Kael: 5001 movies

More soundbites from this great film critic.

Angels with dirty faces 1938

An entertaining picture lurks behind that uninviting title. Warners threw its assets together in this one: James Cagney at his cockiest as a gangster, Pat O'Brien as a priest, and Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, George Bancroft, and the Dead End Kids, too. It has jokes and romance and a smashing big last sequence on Death Row -- the priest asks the gangster to act cowardly when he's executed, so that he won't be a hero to the Dead End Kids, and Cagney comes through with a rousing finale.

Great flick. Filled with actors you would recognize. I love Cagney.

Pauline Kael: 5001 movies

Next up?

All Through the Night 1942

The title of this Humphrey Bogart picture is taken from the Johnny Mercer and Arthur Schwartz song (which is sung in a nightclub sequence) and doesn't provide a clue to what the story is about. Some people might think this is one of the good Bogarts that they've missed; on the contrary it's a sugar-coated anti-Nazi message comedy, and so negligible that you've forgotten it ten minutes after you've staggered out. (It feels long.) Concocted by Leonard Spiegelgass and Edwin Gilbert from a rattlebrained screen story by Spiegelgass and Leonard Ross, and directed (ineptly) by Vincent Sherman, it's set in New York (a studio version) during the Second World War. Bogart is "Gloves" Donohue, a Broadway gambler-promoter, and he and his bunch of meant-to-be-lovable Damon Runyon-esque demi-racketeers (among them Jackie Gleason) rout an entire Nazi fifth column organization, headed by the supersuave Conrad Veidt, dachsund-loving Judith Anderson, and baby-face hit-man Peter Lorre, who operate under cover of an antiques-auction business. The movie oozes sentimentality, and the coy, frolicsome music is like a TV laugh track.

Yeah, I've seen it. Yeah, I agree with Kael. I mean, any Bogart movie is worth a look - he's always good, but the movie is dumb.

Pauline Kael: 5001 movies

Last one for today, and it's a doozy. I love this movie so much.

The African Queen 1951

An inspired piece of casting brought Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn together. This is a comedy, a love story, and a tale of adventure, and it is one of the most charming and entertaining movies ever made. The director, John Huston, has written that the comedy was not present either in the novel by CS Forester or in the original screenplay by James Agee, John Collier and himself, but that it grew out of the relationship of Hepburn and Bogart, who were just naturally funny when they worked together. Hepburn has revealed that the picture wasn't going well until Huston came up with the inspiration that she should think of Rosie as Mrs. Roosevelt. After that, Bogart and Hepburn played together with an ease and humor that makes their love affair -- the mating of a forbidding, ironclad spinster and a tough, gin-soaked riverboat captain -- seem not only inevitable, but perfect. The story, set in central Africa in 1914, is so convincingly acted that you may feel a bit jarred at the end; after the lovers have brought the boat, the African Queen, over dangerous rapids to torpedo a German battleship, Huston seems to stop taking the movie seriously. With Robert Morley as Hepburn's missionary brother, and Peter Bull. Bogart's performance took the Academy Award for Best Actor. (Peter Viertel, who worked on the dialogue while the company was on location in Africa, wrote White Hunter, Black Heart -- one of the best of all moviemaking novels -- about his experiences with Huston.

Great movie. Just great.

Pauline Kael: 5001 movies

Last one for today. Her boiled-down review of Across the Pacific which (naturally) I have seen. Not wacky about it. The story BEHIND the film, and what it was, and why it was made, is more interesting than the film itself. (I only know this now because of my Bogart craze a while back.) Pauline Kael goes into the whys and wherefores of this movie. It's really interesting background.

Across the Pacific 1942

After his exhilarating debut film, The Maltese Falcon (1941), John Huston had a commercial failure with In This Our Life; then he tried to repeat the success of the Falcon with an action-adventure story, using some of the Falcon cast -- Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet. The film was supposed to be about a group sailing to Honolulu to thwart a Japanese plan to blow up Pearl Harbor; during the second week of shooting, the Japanese did blow up Pearl Harbor. The production was shut down and there was a hasty rewrite. The result is a complicated plot about spies who plan to blow up the Panama Canal, and there are assorted captures and hairbreadth escapes. Huston manages to give the sequences some tension, and though the shipboard scenes were -- in the custom of the time -- filmed on the studio back lot, the images are airy and spacious. But Huston couldn't do anything about the essential mediocrity of the material, and when he was drafted into the Army Special Services before the picture was finished, he showed what he thought of the mess: he hurriedly shot a scene with Bogart trussed up and about to be killed, and then left his replacement director, Vincent Sherman, to figure out how to save Bogart in time to prevent the bombing of the Canal. The movie isn't really bad -- just bewildering. Mary Astor comes off the worst; cast as a conventional heroine, she looks heavy and uncomfortable, and too big for Bogart, who, incidentally, was called Rick here -- the name that was carried over the next year in Casablanca.

Interesting stuff, huh? She's right, too - those scenes on the ship are pretty amazing. "Airy and spacious" indeed - it doesn't look like a set, even though you KNOW it is one.

Lauren Bacall and Harper's Bazaar

For background, please read this. If you don't feel like reading it, I will re-cap:

Lauren Bacall was 17 years old, and modeling clothes at various department stores in New York City. This is the early 1940s, understand, so here's the deal:

The body type in style at that time was pretty bodacious. The bullet bras, the miniscule waists, the curving hips ... This was what was "in". (I shoulda been born then, I tell ya.) Lauren Bacall, a lanky teenager, with a long lean body, was not at all in style. She said it herself, when she came to my school to do a seminar, "The clothes didn't hang right on my body. They didn't look good on me."

Diana Vreeland, fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar, thought differently. At the time, she was the only one. But that's what makes a visionary, and Vreeland was, indeed, a visionary.

She saw Betty Bacall, and decided to put her on the cover of Harper's Bazaar.

Now, I will be COMPLETELY obnoxious and quote myself, from the post above:

I believe the photo was taken in 1941 or 1942 - and she was standing in front of a huge Red Cross. It is an arresting image. She has a flat blank face, she stares straight at the camera - there is nothing coy about her. Her skin is pale, her lips are bright red. Again: she doesn't quite look like what models looked like in that time period. She looks like what models look like now. There is a very clear identity on her face - you can see her personality - which models didn't quite have at that time. Think of the runway models now - how they stalk right at you - with this flat blank "Yeah, this is who I am" stare. That was what Bacall looked like on that cover.

The Harper's Bazaar cover was, as Bacall described it to us, "the twist of fate that changed my life forever".

What did Bacall mean by that? Slim Hawks, Howard Hawks' wife, saw the cover and showed it to her husband, saying: "What about this girl?" Howard Hawks, incredible film director (my personal favorite) had been looking for a project. He was a Svengali, he wanted to create a certain type of woman for movies (ahem, let me point to myself again. Here's my post on the Howard Hawks woman.) As a result of Lauren Bacall's Harper's Bazaar cover, Howard Hawks called this skinny teenager out to Hollywood to put her under his own personal contract, to develop projects for her - the first being To Have and Have Not - starring (of course) Humphrey Bogart. Her performance in that film has got to go down in history as one of the greatest and most startling film debuts of all time. Also, you know, there was the little thing of that romance that began on that film!!

Anyway, there's the background.

And here's what just happened. In the original post, I mentioned that I had been Googling up a storm, looking for the exact image of Lauren Bacall's first cover for Harper's Bazaar. I knew the image, because it's in her first autobiography - but I had a HELL of a time finding it online. I found other images from the shoot (which showed up in the pages of that issue) - but not the cover.

So just now, I got an email from a woman named Anna. She must have tripped over that post, through a Google search of her own, and she very very kindly sent me the image of that first Harper's Bazaar cover.

I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to have the image, and I'm thrilled to now be able to share it with you all. It's enormous - so I put it in the extended entry.

Enjoy. LOOK at that face!!! Isn't it so OBVIOUS why she would attract attention?? Isn't it so apparent that she was MEANT to be a star??

Lauren Bacall ... Part III

Her third autobiography has come out. Of course I must read it. I read and loved the other two. A kind of funny article here which gives you a glimpse of Bacall, age 80, on her book tour.

I like, in particular, this quote from Bacall:

"I am always associated with [Bogart] in people's minds — 'the greatest love story ever told.' You can't get away from that. He'd never believe it, of course... It's great that he's still appreciated by so many, because he's worth it. He was a very special human being, Bogart."

I love the "he'd never believe it, of course." Such a nice glimpse into the commonsensical mind of that man.

And here for your viewing pleasure:

And here, what might be my favorite: This was before the romance even blossomed, a publicity shot for To Have and Have Not ... but it's beautifully obvious what was beginning to happen between these two individuals:

She's 19 years old in that photo, about to embark on her first romance ever (ahem, we all should be so lucky to have THAT be our first romance!)

Finally, maybe the most famous picture of all:

That lovely young girl is 80 years old now, and she's still around, and not just as a faint echo of who she used to be, a memory in our collective unconscious, but still getting good parts, writing a new book, acting with great directors. Rare.

Top 5 Mania

Top 5 Humphrey Bogart scenes in films

1. The last scene in Casablanca. Especially the look on his face when he says, "Here's lookin' at you, kid."

2. High Sierra - the last scene, where he is a fugitive from the law hiding in the mountains, screaming down at the cops: "COME AND GET ME!"

3. The Caine Mutiny - the interrogation scene, where you watch him disintegrate mentally - rolling those little ball bearings around in his hand

4. African Queen - when he emerges from the water covered in leeches.

5. To Have and Have Not - the stunned and turned-on look on his face after Lauren Bacall says the "Just put your lips together and blow" line to him.

Top 5 Mania

Top 5 lines said by Humphrey Bogart in his films:

1. "I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them long winter evenings." - The Big Sleep (another good one from The Big Sleep is: "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.")

2. "I was misinformed." - Casablanca

3. "I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I'm gonna send you over." - The Maltese Falcon

4. "Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist..." - The Caine Mutiny

5. "I stick my neck out for nobody." - Casablanca

Yet another reason to love Lauren Bacall ...

Read this anecdote. I love it. Such a spitfire, still!

Obsession Central: Bogart, Bacall - Sheila's Daily Fix

Bogart hated doing publicity shots, and got out of them as often as he could - which, of course, was much easier once he was a huge star.

Martin Weiser - the studio photographer who had been personally assigned to Lauren Bacall (his job was to create the mystique, take the shots which would blanket the country on the release of To Have and Have Not) wanted to get some publicity shots for To Have and Have Not of just the two stars. Weiser was actually assigned to do just that, but Bogart refused. "No. I won't do it. I hate doing them, and I won't do it." He was immovable.

Bacall, knowing that these photos would be important for her career, sweet-talked Bogie into allowing it.

45 years later, Martin Weiser, in an interview, was still able to remember the "magic" of his photo shoot - which had to be squeezed in between a lunch break and the filming of the afternoon.

Of course, at this point, Bogie was married to someone else (very unhappily - the two of them were known as "the Battling Bogarts" - she stabbed him in the back with a knife - he blacked her eye - their battles were famous) - and Lauren Bacall was a teenager about to become a massive star.

But the growing connection between the two of them is obvious in the photo below, which is one of the shots from Weiser's photo shoot:

Daily Fix

From the last scene of The Big Sleep:

Last exchange of the film:

She: And what about me?
He: You? What's wrong with you?
She: Nothing you can't fix.

One more for the road

Sigh.

Obsession Central: Bacall

Another one of those photos. CW - this is for you!!

Apparently, Truman regretted this photo later - but nobody else did!

She's 20 years old. She married Bogie a month or so later. This was in her period of white-hot celebrity - which was soon to end. (Not for good - she would come back - but never with the intensity of that first flash.)

Look at her. No wonder Bogie always called her "Baby".

Obsession Central: Bogart

The picture kind of says it all, doesn't it?

Obsession Central: Bogart and Morris Carnovsky

Last night I saw Dead Reckoning, which should clue you in to the fact that I am now beginning to watch the relatively BAD movies that Bogart made. My video store doesn't have "High Sierra" or "The Petrified Forest" (the film that launched his career) - so I now have to submerge myself in melodrama.

Er ... have to, Sheila?

"Dead Reckoning" borders on camp, but it is not Bogart's fault. In the midst of the camp, and in the midst of the almost laughably silly last scene - he remains truthful. He gives an affecting performance. This is the movie where he has the famous monologue about how he wishes he could magically make women be about 4 inches small, "small enough to put away in my pocket" - and then you could go out to dinner - with the woman in your pocket - sit down at the table, "take her out, and let her run around among the coffee cups" - (that image made me laugh) - "And then - when you want her to be life-size and beautiful..." (for obvious purposes) "You just wave your hand, and there they are."

But Lizbeth Scott who plays the woman opposite him is ... she is FILLED with camp. She is FILLED with melodrama. How did he not burst out laughing at some of her moments? I wanted to wave my hand and make HER 4 inches small and put her away in my pocket for good.

I also didn't really care for the shape of her nostrils.

One treat for me, in watching the film, was that Morris Carnovsky played Martinelli - the casino-owner. If you had grown up in the 30s and 40s and had any awareness of theatre and good actors, you would have known the name Morris Carnovsky. I feel like I know Morris Carnovsky. He was a veteran of Broadway, a serious actor of the classics. He was married to Phoebe Brand, a petite boisterous actress who, I believe, died a couple years ago. Carnovsky and Brand were involved with the Group Theatre in the 1930s - that fabled organization which lasted only a decade but which had such an enormous impact on our culture.

We feel the impact now, and even if you don't even know about the Group Theatre, it is there.

Lee Strasberg was one of the founders. A bad director, and a brilliant teacher of actors - he went on to run the Actors Studio for many years. And he trained many of the people who defined American cinema in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. James Dean, Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel ... the list is endless. Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson...

Elia Kazan, brilliant director and limited actor, started as one of the acting ensemble in the Group Theatre. He was the toast of the town for about 4 or 5 years, before he realized that he was quite limited as an actor - and that he would better off being a director. He was right.

Harold Clurman, one of the greatest critics of our time, of ANY time, was one of the founders of the Group Theatre. A true zealot, a true intellect - an incredible writer. His books are in print to this day, and directors and playwrights alike would do well to study them. On Directing is considered a classic.

Jules (known as Julie) Garfield (who later became a huge Hollywood star in the late 30s and 40s - and changed his name to John so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the anti-Semitic times) came from the Group Theatre. The lead role in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy was written for Julie. However, the part was eventually given to Luther Adler. Julie played the great role of Siggie, the boisterous unintellectual cab driver who is always romping in bed with his wife Anna (played by Phoebe Brand). I was in a production of this show - I played Anna. Garfield never really got over being rejected for the lead role, however, and accepted a 2 picture movie contract with Warner Brothers. He, obviously, became massively successful - and is considered by many to be the first "Method movie star". Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson - all owe a huge debt to Julie Garfield. Garfield died of a heart attack at the age of 39.

Oops, one thing to add about Julie Garfield: While indeed he was quite dissipated in many of his habits - and he cultivated to perfection the role of the bitter outsider which he used to great effect in his parts - and yes, he did live hard, and drink hard - many believe that the unending harassment he received from the HUAC who went after him with a singlemindedness and ruthlessness that they showed to nobody else - many believe that it was that which led to his premature death. They were determined to "get" Julie Garfield. He was a big star, a heartthrob, etc. He was the "name" that the committee wanted the most. Anyone who testified for the HUAC - Miller, Kazan, Odets - all those people - they all mention that the name the HUAC wanted the most was "John Garfield". Some people believe that Garfield was hounded to death. 39 is quite young to have a heart attack, obviously. Anyway, it's a shame. It would have been very interesting to see how he would have grown, and what being an older man would have given to his acting.

Clifford Odets. Wrote about 6 great plays, and then a bunch of mediocre ones. But his great plays are so great that it makes you want to put down your pen forever. I've performed in many of them. They are as fun to act as they are to read. Odets became a star because the Group Theatre produced his plays.

Morris Carnovsky was one of the acting ensemble. Made a name for himself playing roles much older than himself. He was very much looked up to. Many of the Group actors were much younger, barely out of their teens. Some, like Julie Garfield, were completely uneducated, and had nothing but raw ambition, and a desire to be part of an ensemble - an ensemble that actually tried to produce plays about the time they were living in, plays that actually addressed The Great Depression, and the desperation they saw around them. At this time, Broadway was mostly producing Philip Barry comedies and Moss Hart comedies - all amazingly wonderful, but all about the upper-class, untouched by the Depression, floating through life, having romances, smoking cigarettes, witty repartee. The Group was interested in something different. Odets became their voice.

Carnovsky became a kind of father figure to the young and mostly Jewish actors, raised in the ghetto of the Lower East Side. They looked up to him, they learned from him. Carnovsky was experienced as an actor, had been on stage for many years, he was an educated man. He was someone to emulate - great work ethic, great respect for his craft.

Carnovsky's career was ruined by the blacklist. He didn't work again. At least not in films. He became a teacher.

I am still angry at what I have been denied, so many years later, because of this man not being allowed to act. What performances he might have given, what parts he might have played...

I have actually never SEEN Morris Carnovsky act until last night - and there he was, acting with Bogart. Carnovsky is the second male lead, and he is fantastic. I recognized his face as though it were the face of an old friend. I got tears in my eyes. "There he is," I thought. "There is Morris Carnovsky."

This film was done in 1947. His career ended in 1951. Staring at him, I felt this sadness, this: look out, my friend. The dark bat wings are already flapping above your community ... get ready ... get ready ... You will never work again.

Quotes: The Big Sleep

Vivian Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first, see if they're front-runners or come from behind, find out what their whole card is, what makes them run.

Marlowe Find out mine?

Vivian I think so.

Marlowe Go ahead.

Vivian I'd say you don't like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the backstretch, and then come home free.

Marlowe You don't like to be rated yourself.

Vivian I haven't met anyone yet that can do it. Any suggestions?

Marlowe Well, I can't tell till I've seen you over a distance of ground. You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how, how far you can go.

Vivian A lot depends on who's in the saddle.

Quotes: The Big Sleep

Vivian: You go too far, Marlowe.

Marlowe: Those are harsh words to throw at a man, especially when he's walking out of your bedroom.

Quotes: The Big Sleep

Vivian (Bacall): I don't like your manners.

Marlowe (Bogart): I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like 'em myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them long winter evenings.

Quotes: The Big Sleep

Sternwood: How do you like your brandy, sir?

Marlowe: In a glass.

Obsession Central: The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep, as incomprehensible as it is, is fast becoming one of my favorite movies. My Top 50 movies list is due for a HUGE overhaul.

There's so much juicy stuff to enjoy in The Big Sleep ...

-- The way Mr. Sternwood, dying, cooped up in his greenhouse, gets this overwhelmingly famished look on his face, as he watches Marlowe (Bogie) take a sip of brandy. It is like - the way he yearns for a taste - even though alcohol is now forbidden to him - the yearning is so loud he doesn't even need any lines to convey it. I watch Mr. Sternwood's reactions to Marlowe drinking and I can taste the brandy

-- During the filming of the entire first scene between Bogart and Bacall - where he is called to talk to her in her bedroom, and there she is, pouring a drink - Anyway, Bacall said that, as always, she was so nervous for that scene that she was literally trembling from head to foot. She calls it her "quake". So much so that she thought she would drop the glass onto the floor. Funny - you watch the scene, and you'd never know.

-- Does anyone remember the female cab driver? Marlowe gets into her cab, and basically tells her to follow Geiger's car. She has black hair, a little cap on, she's cute. At the end, they have some pretty outrageous sexual banter, which goes something like: He hands her a big tip and says, "Here. Buy yourself a cigar." She hands him a card and says, "Listen - if you ever need a ride again..." He grins at her, takes the card, and says, "Day or night?" Her reply is, "Night. I work during the day." And they both laugh - and she drives off.

Anyway - that actress' name was Joy Barlowe - and this was her first job. She also was quakingly nervous. She had this big scene with Humphrey Bogart, ya da ya da, she was terrified.

In addition to all of that - little kid gloves were part of her costume - and they made it very difficult for her to slide the card out of her wallet to hand over to him. She couldn't get it right. Her fingers would stumble, she couldn't get the card out, they'd have to do another take.

Barlowe describes being positively mortified. To make Humphrey Bogart do 10 takes, because she couldn't do this simple little action of handing him a card. She thought she was going to get fired.

Finally, after a fumbling take, Bogart said to her, "Try it this way, honey," - and he put one of the cards above the sun-visor. She could just reach up, grab it, hand it to him.

It worked.

She was always grateful to him for that. For his patience with this new and nervous actress, and for coming up with a smooth solution to her problem.

If you watch the moment, too - it's a great moment. Soooo smooth. She is this black-haired kind of fresh-mouthed cabbie, and he is grinning into the window at her, appreciating her.

Nice.

-- The amazing actress, Martha Vickers, who played Lauren Bacall's sister - remember her? The one who gets the family into the whole mess in the first place, getting messed up with pornographers, and drugs, etc. Marlowe describes her as "Pretty....And pretty wild." She did such an incredible job with her role (and she was just a teenager, pretty new to acting) - that Howard Hawks (the director) felt she upstaged Bacall, and so cut her scenes back considerably.

But anyway, here's a story about Martha Vickers, the teenage actress who so convincingly played a drugged-out thumb-sucking nymphomaniac.

Hawks had an idea for one of the scenes - where Marlowe comes in, and finds her sitting, all dressed up in the empty house - obviously some kind of lecherous photo shoot had been going on. And Marlowe comes upon her, and she is high on drugs, and completely out of it. Anyway, Hawks had an idea for this scene (which ended up not making it into the movie): He wanted Vickers to simulate an orgasm.

He asked her to do so. This is in front of Bogart, Regis Toomey (who plays the DA), and a couple of other people.

"Sweetheart, what we want here is for you to simulate that you're having an orgasm."

Martha Vickers asked, "What's an orgasm?"

Nobody spoke. Nobody knew what to do. Literally. These three men, Hawks, Bogart, and Toomey - standing there with a teenage actress - asking them what an orgasm was. Dead silence. Hawks called a 10 minute break, and called Toomey aside. He asked Toomey to please go and explain to "Miss Vickers" what an orgasm was.

Toomey, who apparently was a good-natured fellow, but also the product of a strict Irish Catholic upbringing (so funny to imagine!!), went over to Martha and explained it to her. (Wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that one.)

Toomey said later to Bogart, "The girl didn't know anything. I asked, 'Are you a virgin?' 'Uh yes.' 'Do you know what an orgasm is? Mr. Hawks wants you to be having an orgasm here.' 'No, I don't know what it is.' 'You don't know what an orgasm is?' 'No.' And so, dammit, I explained to her what an orgasm was. And she got the idea all right. Howard liked the scene very much."

After that, it became a huge joke. Hawks would say to Toomey, "If I ever have to explain an orgasm again, I am calling on you." And Bogie would laugh and laugh like a madman.

For some reason I just love that story.

Obsession Central: Bogart

"He's the ugliest handsome man I've ever seen."

-- Lauren Bacall on Humphrey Bogart

Obsession Central: Bogart

"He's the ugliest handsome man I've ever seen."

-- Lauren Bacall on Humphrey Bogart

Obsession Central: Bogart

I rented In a Lonely Place last night, a Humphrey Bogart film from 1950.

Nicholas Ray, who later went on to direct Rebel without a Cause, is the director.

There are a couple of interesting stories behind this very good film. If you like Bogart, and you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. It's another side to him, something he rarely got to show: his intellect. Bogart was a well-read man. Most of his best friends were writers. He preferred writer-friends to actor-friends, and had the utmost respect for the printed word.

He wrote an essay defending the Hollywood Ten, during the HUAC hysteria, when his friends were being hounded to death and blacklisted, and his essay is something else, truly. He wrote every word.

In In a Lonely Place he plays Dixon Steele, a semi-washed-up screenwriter in Hollywood. There's something a little "off" about him. He obviously has talent, he had had some successes a while back - but he has a hair-trigger temper, and there's something else. Something else. It's a paranoia, yes - but there's this unbeLIEVable sadness too. The kind of sadness that Bogart can portray, without a word, without a gesture. All he has to do is just sit there, let the camera pick up what's going on his face and you feel all this grief.

This film has been called "one of the best pictures ever made about Hollywood" and I would agree.

Dixon Steele trusts no one. He has an agent, who hovers around him, trying to get him to get back to work. There's an old drunk actor who hangs out at the same bar, a washed-up actor who obviously was once great - and Steele treats him very gently, and with respect, in the face of everyone else's derision.

There is gentleness in the Steele character. Bogart makes that completely believable. You kind of fall in love with him, actually. Which is why the movie works on such a deep level - because when he falls, and he does fall, it is tragic. You find yourself rooting for this odd dark man - and yet - he's scary at times, as well.

Gloria Grahame, who was completely underestimated as a talent at the time, got the lead. She's great - Her performance would completely fit into a modern-day film. There's nothing dated about it. (Well, except for the shape of her eyebrows.)

I don't want to give the plot away, because you just have to watch it unfold ... and watch this man's life fall apart.

What is interesting about this part, in comparison to other roles - like in Casablanca or Maltese Falcon and others - is that ... the typical Bogart thing that we all recognize: the tough-guy act, the way he is with women, the straight-talking, the intensity - all of that is there, but because of the material, it is no longer idealized. It is seen through another filter - and suddenly it seems like this man is a tremendously damaged individual, that nothing will heal him. He is HARD. I'm not sure if I'm making the point correctly.

All of the qualities which make him so wonderful in Casablanca exist as well in In a Lonely Place - only now they seem like character flaws.

Brave. Brave for Bogart to do that with his image.

My favorite moment? Well, I have a couple.

Gloria Grahame as the neighbor - who eventually ends up falling in love with Bogart - says to him in their first scene together when they meet:

"I like your face. It's interesting."

Dixon Steele becomes a little bit obsessed with her in that moment. He latches onto her - she likes his face, she likes his face - maybe there's hope for him if someone like THAT is into HIM! It's sad. You worry for him.

The next time they meet, they stand in the foyer of his apartment. There is some great back-and-forth banter. She is obviously a woman with an edge. She doesn't play games. She keeps her distance from him. He calls her on it. "You're the I-don't-want-to-get-hurt type." She says, "Is there anything wrong with that?" He smiles and says, "I suppose you save yourself a lot of trouble."

In the middle of this banter, when he is pushing her to have dinner with him that night, and she is holding him off - all with humor though - she obviously likes him - she just thinks he's going too fast - Anyway, here's my favorite moment:

In the middle of this, he suddenly says, a propos of nothing: "You are out of your mind."

I had no idea what he was referring to. He breaks away from her, and goes to the hallway mirror, and peers at himself anxiously. He stands there, staring at his own reflection. He says, to himself, with no self-pity - it's just the facts - "Who could like this face?"

He turns back to her and then - as he moves in to kiss her - says, in this - "come on, let's be realistic" voice, "Look at it..."

She doesn't let him kiss her by the way.

But the way he says "Look at it..." It's sexy, it's sad, it's like he is a little boy actually. He can hardly believe his luck. And his hope for something, his eagerness for a relationship ... it's a little bit scary. He needs it too much.

And another favorite moment which - I mean, I don't want to be accused of hyperbole - (Me??) but I think it might be the "real"-est I've ever seen Bogart.

It's at the very end.

A huge fight has occurred between the two of them. Things get quite frightening. He is out of control. He is truly out of control with her. This is not an actor, doing polite fight choreography. She is frightened. He is in a rage - you can tell that his whole life is slipping out of his grasp. She was his chance at happiness ... and what makes his violence so scary is that ... he knows that he is breaking his own heart by turning his violence on her - There is such LOSS in his violence ... It's a scary scene. It feels real.

He comes out of her bedroom, and - he just leans on the back of the couch for a minute.

He leans on the back of the couch.

I can't describe why it is such a moving moment - but the way he leaned on the couch told me his entire life-story of disappointment and defeat.

Tears filled my eyes.

Now that's some fine acting.

When the film came out in 1950, it was hailed as Bogart's best work. Some critics still think that it is his best work.

If you ever see it on the shelf somewhere, I recommend you see it. It's yummy stuff.

Obsession Central: Bogart

I rented In a Lonely Place last night, a Humphrey Bogart film from 1950.

Nicholas Ray, who later went on to direct Rebel without a Cause, is the director.

There are a couple of interesting stories behind this very good film. If you like Bogart, and you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. It's another side to him, something he rarely got to show: his intellect. Bogart was a well-read man. Most of his best friends were writers. He preferred writer-friends to actor-friends, and had the utmost respect for the printed word.

He wrote an essay defending the Hollywood Ten, during the HUAC hysteria, when his friends were being hounded to death and blacklisted, and his essay is something else, truly. He wrote every word.

In In a Lonely Place he plays Dixon Steele, a semi-washed-up screenwriter in Hollywood. There's something a little "off" about him. He obviously has talent, he had had some successes a while back - but he has a hair-trigger temper, and there's something else. Something else. It's a paranoia, yes - but there's this unbeLIEVable sadness too. The kind of sadness that Bogart can portray, without a word, without a gesture. All he has to do is just sit there, let the camera pick up what's going on his face and you feel all this grief.

This film has been called "one of the best pictures ever made about Hollywood" and I would agree.

Dixon Steele trusts no one. He has an agent, who hovers around him, trying to get him to get back to work. There's an old drunk actor who hangs out at the same bar, a washed-up actor who obviously was once great - and Steele treats him very gently, and with respect, in the face of everyone else's derision.

There is gentleness in the Steele character. Bogart makes that completely believable. You kind of fall in love with him, actually. Which is why the movie works on such a deep level - because when he falls, and he does fall, it is tragic. You find yourself rooting for this odd dark man - and yet - he's scary at times, as well.

Gloria Grahame, who was completely underestimated as a talent at the time, got the lead. She's great - Her performance would completely fit into a modern-day film. There's nothing dated about it. (Well, except for the shape of her eyebrows.)

I don't want to give the plot away, because you just have to watch it unfold ... and watch this man's life fall apart.

What is interesting about this part, in comparison to other roles - like in Casablanca or Maltese Falcon and others - is that ... the typical Bogart thing that we all recognize: the tough-guy act, the way he is with women, the straight-talking, the intensity - all of that is there, but because of the material, it is no longer idealized. It is seen through another filter - and suddenly it seems like this man is a tremendously damaged individual, that nothing will heal him. He is HARD. I'm not sure if I'm making the point correctly.

All of the qualities which make him so wonderful in Casablanca exist as well in In a Lonely Place - only now they seem like character flaws.

Brave. Brave for Bogart to do that with his image.

My favorite moment? Well, I have a couple.

Gloria Grahame as the neighbor - who eventually ends up falling in love with Bogart - says to him in their first scene together when they meet:

"I like your face. It's interesting."

Dixon Steele becomes a little bit obsessed with her in that moment. He latches onto her - she likes his face, she likes his face - maybe there's hope for him if someone like THAT is into HIM! It's sad. You worry for him.

The next time they meet, they stand in the foyer of his apartment. There is some great back-and-forth banter. She is obviously a woman with an edge. She doesn't play games. She keeps her distance from him. He calls her on it. "You're the I-don't-want-to-get-hurt type." She says, "Is there anything wrong with that?" He smiles and says, "I suppose you save yourself a lot of trouble."

In the middle of this banter, when he is pushing her to have dinner with him that night, and she is holding him off - all with humor though - she obviously likes him - she just thinks he's going too fast - Anyway, here's my favorite moment:

In the middle of this, he suddenly says, a propos of nothing: "You are out of your mind."

I had no idea what he was referring to. He breaks away from her, and goes to the hallway mirror, and peers at himself anxiously. He stands there, staring at his own reflection. He says, to himself, with no self-pity - it's just the facts - "Who could like this face?"

He turns back to her and then - as he moves in to kiss her - says, in this - "come on, let's be realistic" voice, "Look at it..."

She doesn't let him kiss her by the way.

But the way he says "Look at it..." It's sexy, it's sad, it's like he is a little boy actually. He can hardly believe his luck. And his hope for something, his eagerness for a relationship ... it's a little bit scary. He needs it too much.

And another favorite moment which - I mean, I don't want to be accused of hyperbole - (Me??) but I think it might be the "real"-est I've ever seen Bogart.

It's at the very end.

A huge fight has occurred between the two of them. Things get quite frightening. He is out of control. He is truly out of control with her. This is not an actor, doing polite fight choreography. She is frightened. He is in a rage - you can tell that his whole life is slipping out of his grasp. She was his chance at happiness ... and what makes his violence so scary is that ... he knows that he is breaking his own heart by turning his violence on her - There is such LOSS in his violence ... It's a scary scene. It feels real.

He comes out of her bedroom, and - he just leans on the back of the couch for a minute.

He leans on the back of the couch.

I can't describe why it is such a moving moment - but the way he leaned on the couch told me his entire life-story of disappointment and defeat.

Tears filled my eyes.

Now that's some fine acting.

When the film came out in 1950, it was hailed as Bogart's best work. Some critics still think that it is his best work.

If you ever see it on the shelf somewhere, I recommend you see it. It's yummy stuff.

A word on obsessions

No sign of the end of the Bogart Tunnel. I may very well never come out. But then again, I felt that way a couple years ago, after seeing LA Confidential, when I slipped off the rails into Russell Crowe mania. And I didn't have a blog then!! Imagine the entries!

Once a passion, always a passion.

The Eminem thing shows no signs of dying out. He and I are going on a couple years now. Of course, the intensity has faded a bit, and I am able, once again, to listen to other music. But he's still in pretty much constant rotation.

So obsessions do normalize, eventually. What can I say? When I love something, I go all out.

Yesterday, I finally got some antibiotics. Had a nice birthday-chat with my dad, while waiting for the bus. Went into my video store, knowing that the second I got home, I would take this codeine-cough-suppressant thing - and be dead to the world. So what did I need? A Bogart movie, n'est ce pas.

Unfortunately, my video joint doesn't have High Sierra or The Petrified Forest - the two films I really want to see now.

But - randomly - they DID have In a Lonely Place - which I have never seen. The Bogart biography I just finished made a couple of choice comments on Bogie's performance which made me think: Hm, sounds like that movie was something special.

So I pounced on it. Excited.

Took the bus home, through the cool blue twilight. Sick as a damn dog. Got home. Pajamas on. Curled up in my arm chair. Took the cough suppressant. Immediately began to feel it working, a warmth in my limbs, a softness in my throat and in my brain, and I watched In a Lonely Place.

More thoughts to come. It is a WONDERFUL movie. A true surprise. Not a bad scene in the whole thing.

And then - to bed.

Slept peacefully for the first time in 5 days.

Obsession Central: Bogart

Bogart, after doing film after film after film where he played a villain - this was in the early 30s - where he always seemed to get shot by Edward G. Robinson - finally got a chance to show another side to his character in Maltese Falcon. Yeah, that guy kind of was a bit shady, played both sides of the law, but he was tough, he was gritty, and in the end, he did the right thing, even though he did love the girl. He let her hang by her "sweet neck", regardless of his personal feelings for her.

But because he had only played bad guys, interminably, he was completely baffled and "phobic" (his words) about doing love scenes. He felt awkward, silly, had no idea what to do - and also embarrassed about the scar on his lip.

His first screen kiss was with the delicious Mary Astor in Maltese Falcon - and apparently he couldn't get it right, couldn't grab her right, couldn't get his act together, couldn't relax. They did take after take. He started to sweat profusely, and the makeup-guy had to keep running over to dab at Bogart's face.

John Huston finally exploded, "It's just a simple kiss, it's nothing! Grab her, kiss her, turn her loose! That's it!!"

7 takes later, Huston was finally satisfied.

Mary Astor later said about Bogart, "He didn't like love scenes. He's not really a kissing type. But Bogie didn't have to kiss the girl. He didn't have to touch her. You knew by the way he looked at her."

They worked together again in Across the Pacific (Just so you know: I am typing all of this THROUGH my embarrassment. I am embarrassed that I know all of this information. But there is nothing else to do but to share it.) Anyway: Astor and Bogart had to kiss again a year later, in Across the Pacific. Bogart still treated the whole thing awkwardly, embarrassed.

At one point, she pulled back and snapped at him, "Try not to knock my teeth out next time!"

Bogart was mortified and mumbled, "I'm sorry, kid."

Mary Astor then, of course, had to profusely apologize to him because she saw how embarrassed he was.

Bogart said later that, from his years of playing villains, he became used to treating leading ladies simply as colleagues, not romantic or sexual figures, or potential conquests - since he never had to play love scenes with them.

And even though eventually everyone figured out that this short balding scarred-lipped lisping man was DAMN sexy - he never really figured that out, and never was comfortable with all of that. Bette Davis was sure that that was why his love scenes are so effective.

"He holds parts of himself back. The way men do in real life. Women understand that, they recognize that. It's very attractive."

(Again: I am mortified at my autistic level of knowledge. Pressing through it, pressing through it)

Bogart said to an interviewer once, "I don't like love scenes, maybe because I don't do them very well. It isn't possible to shoot a love scene without having a hairy-chested group of grips standing four feet away from you, chewing tobacco. I'll handle that in the privacy of my bedroom, old boy."

To give you an idea of the vibe around Bogart at the time they were going into Casablanca -

Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers, apparently said, to Ingrid Bergman, scoffingly, before the shooting began:

"Who'd want to kiss Bogart?"

Ingrid calmly said, "I would."

Women were ahead of the curve on that one.

Obsession Central: Bogart

Bogart, after doing film after film after film where he played a villain - this was in the early 30s - where he always seemed to get shot by Edward G. Robinson - finally got a chance to show another side to his character in Maltese Falcon. Yeah, that guy kind of was a bit shady, played both sides of the law, but he was tough, he was gritty, and in the end, he did the right thing, even though he did love the girl. He let her hang by her "sweet neck", regardless of his personal feelings for her.

But because he had only played bad guys, interminably, he was completely baffled and "phobic" (his words) about doing love scenes. He felt awkward, silly, had no idea what to do - and also embarrassed about the scar on his lip.

His first screen kiss was with the delicious Mary Astor in Maltese Falcon - and apparently he couldn't get it right, couldn't grab her right, couldn't get his act together, couldn't relax. They did take after take. He started to sweat profusely, and the makeup-guy had to keep running over to dab at Bogart's face.

John Huston finally exploded, "It's just a simple kiss, it's nothing! Grab her, kiss her, turn her loose! That's it!!"

7 takes later, Huston was finally satisfied.

Mary Astor later said about Bogart, "He didn't like love scenes. He's not really a kissing type. But Bogie didn't have to kiss the girl. He didn't have to touch her. You knew by the way he looked at her."

They worked together again in Across the Pacific (Just so you know: I am typing all of this THROUGH my embarrassment. I am embarrassed that I know all of this information. But there is nothing else to do but to share it.) Anyway: Astor and Bogart had to kiss again a year later, in Across the Pacific. Bogart still treated the whole thing awkwardly, embarrassed.

At one point, she pulled back and snapped at him, "Try not to knock my teeth out next time!"

Bogart was mortified and mumbled, "I'm sorry, kid."

Mary Astor then, of course, had to profusely apologize to him because she saw how embarrassed he was.

Bogart said later that, from his years of playing villains, he became used to treating leading ladies simply as colleagues, not romantic or sexual figures, or potential conquests - since he never had to play love scenes with them.

And even though eventually everyone figured out that this short balding scarred-lipped lisping man was DAMN sexy - he never really figured that out, and never was comfortable with all of that. Bette Davis was sure that that was why his love scenes are so effective.

"He holds parts of himself back. The way men do in real life. Women understand that, they recognize that. It's very attractive."

(Again: I am mortified at my autistic level of knowledge. Pressing through it, pressing through it)

Bogart said to an interviewer once, "I don't like love scenes, maybe because I don't do them very well. It isn't possible to shoot a love scene without having a hairy-chested group of grips standing four feet away from you, chewing tobacco. I'll handle that in the privacy of my bedroom, old boy."

To give you an idea of the vibe around Bogart at the time they were going into Casablanca -

Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers, apparently said, to Ingrid Bergman, scoffingly, before the shooting began:

"Who'd want to kiss Bogart?"

Ingrid calmly said, "I would."

Women were ahead of the curve on that one.

Obsession Central: Maltese Falcon

Letter to Jack Warner, from George Raft, a big star, turning down the role in The Maltese Falcon:

"As you know, I strongly feel that The Maltese Falcon is not an important picture."

Obsession Central: Maltese Falcon

Letter to Jack Warner, from George Raft, a big star, turning down the role in The Maltese Falcon:

"As you know, I strongly feel that The Maltese Falcon is not an important picture."

Obsession Central: Bogart

Humphrey Bogart started out as a stage manager, in the 1920s. Occasionally, along with the job of stage manager, he would understudy lead roles. He knew nothing about acting. He described the first night he had to go on, and hearing other actors talking to him, and sensing the audience out there - and he said he had never been so afraid in his life.

He started getting parts on his own, however. Usually second to the leading man. He wasn't a tough guy yet. He played young urbane lovesick kids, and apparently (this may just be a legend) said, as an improvisation one night, "Tennis, anyone?" That pretty much sums up the kinds of parts he played.

Usually he was never mentioned in the reviews.

One review, however, for the play Swifty was the first one that ever mentioned him, the first time his name was ever in the newspaper.

Here is what the review said:

"The young man who embodies the aforesaid sprig is what is usually and mercifully described as inadequate."

Bogart kept that clipped-out review for the rest of his days.

Obsession Central: Bogart

Humphrey Bogart started out as a stage manager, in the 1920s. Occasionally, along with the job of stage manager, he would understudy lead roles. He knew nothing about acting. He described the first night he had to go on, and hearing other actors talking to him, and sensing the audience out there - and he said he had never been so afraid in his life.

He started getting parts on his own, however. Usually second to the leading man. He wasn't a tough guy yet. He played young urbane lovesick kids, and apparently (this may just be a legend) said, as an improvisation one night, "Tennis, anyone?" That pretty much sums up the kinds of parts he played.

Usually he was never mentioned in the reviews.

One review, however, for the play Swifty was the first one that ever mentioned him, the first time his name was ever in the newspaper.

Here is what the review said:

"The young man who embodies the aforesaid sprig is what is usually and mercifully described as inadequate."

Bogart kept that clipped-out review for the rest of his days.

Bit of Trivia

-- that perhaps everybody else already know.

You know the scene in Treasure of the Sierra Madre where the little Hispanic kid runs up to Bogart, trying to sell him a lottery ticket? And he bugs him and bugs him until finally Bogart throws a glass of water in his face?

The little kid shows up a couple of scenes later, to tell Dobbs his ticket won - just in time to save the day, and give them the necessary cash to go prospecting...

Anyway - you know that kid?

That was Robert Blake. Mr. I-went-back-to-the-restaurant-to-get-my-gun-and-when-I-returned-to-the-car-my-crazy/skank wife-was-dead Blake.

I know he's in a lot of trouble right now, and sounds like he's guilty as sin, but he was some actor, when the part was right. In Cold Blood comes to mind, with that great shot of him looking out the window, as the rain falls, and the reflection of the raindrops makes it LOOK as though he's crying. Classic.

Yesterday I stayed home and read this biography of Bogart I have (help? Obsession?) - and there were many quotes from the young and intimidated "Bobby" Blake, who was 11 or 12 at the time, about what Bogart was like.

The main impression Blake had - or the main thing he remembered - which shocked him, as a little kid - was how Bogart would look at the script, and immediately start cutting his lines down. Crossing stuff out, mercilessly.

Smart man.

If you can convey something without words, all the better.

But Blake watched this process, thinking, "Wow! He doesn't want to talk!"

Obsession Central: Treasure of the Sierra Madre

So like I said: I've been very very sick for the past 3 days. Bed-ridden kind of sick. My rib-cage actually hurts.

One advantage of illness, is that you can watch 3 movies a day, while lolling about in your pajamas, and feel very little guilt. I mean, I do that normally, but when I'm sick, I feel even less guilt.

This weekend, I watched "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" - which, no doubt, is a great great favorite with many people out there.

What a fantastic movie - quite ahead of its time, I think. Ahead of its time because of the darkness of the story, its ambiguities, its lack of redemption at the end ... the pointlessness of it all - the nihilism ... and then the roaring laughter as they realize that all their gold has blown away ...

I loved it. The acting is so good, all around, that you want to eat it up with a big spoon. YUM.

Roger Ebert puts this film on the Best Movies Ever Made list. Most other reviewers do as well, and it is in the Top 100 Films Ever Made, chosen by the AFI.

I loved Roger Ebert's words on the movie. Here is the review in total, for those who are interested.

The excerpts I like, though:

It tells this story with gusto and Huston's love of male camaraderie, and it occasionally breaks into laughter -- some funny, some bitterly ironic. It happens on a sun-blasted high chaparral landscape, usually desolate, except for the three gold prospectors, although gangs of bandits and villages of Indians materialize when required. At the end, it has Bogart in a delirious mad scene that falls somewhere between "King Lear" and "Greed."

Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, one of the movie characters everybody can name.

So true, huh?

The descent of his character into paranoia is, again, indicative of his greatness and also his lack of ego as an actor. He did not care about appearances. He cared about truth. Dobbs is a scary guy. A tragic guy.

And then - Ebert talks about Walter Huston - My God, who can ever forget Walter Huston's performance?? Wasn't he magnificent? It's deceptively simple, what he does. I watched his acting like a hawk, because the performance is now considered a classic performance, one of the great examples of movie-acting ... I feel like I could see the movie 20 times and still not get to the bottom of what makes Huston's acting so fantastic.

Ebert tries to analyze it too:

The performance is a masterpiece by Walter Huston, John's father, and won an Academy Award ... Listen to the way the senior Huston talks, rapid-fire, without pause, as if he's briefing them on an old tale and doesn't have time to waste on nuance. He does a famous dance when he finally finds gold, playing the stereotype of a grizzled prospector, but see how his eyes are sometimes quiet even when he's playing the fool; he reads every situation, knows his options, tries to slow Dobbs' meltdown.

That's part of it. He does "play the fool". It is like Huston is The Fool to Bogart's King Lear. And yet - of course - in this picture, as in Shakespeare, the Fool is always the wisest character of them all.

But Ebert ends his review with a discussion of the Dobbs character, as so fearlessly created by Humphrey Bogart:

I've seen "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" many times, but watching it again today on a new DVD, I found myself gripped as always by Bogart's closing scenes. The movie has never really been about gold but about character, and Bogart fearlessly makes Fred C. Dobbs into a pathetic, frightened, selfish man -- so sick we would be tempted to pity him, if he were not so undeserving of pity. The other two characters get more or less what they deserve at the end of the film, but with less satisfaction for the audience. After Howard is taken in by an Indian tribe, there is a gratuitous shot, where a young maiden pats his whiskers and he all but winks directly at the camera; this shot, and the idyllic village life surrounding it, belong in a lesser movie.

As the stories of Howard and Curtin evaporate into convention, however, Fred C. Dobbs somehow moves to a higher level of tragedy. Hearing things in the night, desperate for a drink of water, staggering under the desert sun with the gold he valued so much, Dobbs is the tragic hero brought down precisely by his flaws. There is a pitiless stark realism in these scenes that brings the movie to honesty and truth. Leading up to them is a down-market Shakespearean soliloquy when Dobbs thinks he is a murderer and says, "Conscience. What a thing! If you believe you got a conscience, it'll pester you to death. But if you don't believe you got one, what could it do to ya?" He finds out.

When Dobbs, after begging for money in the streets at the beginning of the film, uses the coins to get a shave and a haircut - there is a close-up of him, as he asks John Huston (the man in the white suit, also the director of the film - making a brief cameo) for money. He wants to go buy a whore, and so he has gotten himself gussied up.

But his hair is so thin, his face is so tragic and serious - he has his thin hair combed over to one side, sleeked, he is in his 50s, his face has all these lines, he has that weird almost buck-toothed mouth - and it is an unforgiving closeup, as he asks for money again.

He looks so pathetic. So ... old and unattractive.

Granted: Bogart wasn't your typical Good-looking Movie Star Guy. But still - this is the most unattractive and pathetic you will ever see him. Bogart rarely played pathetic guys, guys your heart aches for even though you would not want to spend one minute in their presence ...

It's a brave performance - completely successful - and yes, it is tragic in its scope.

Trivia about the film:

Humphrey Bogart and John Huston worked many times together - pretty much always to very very famous results.

Maltese Falcon - which has to be one of the most impressive directorial debuts in motion picture history. Bogart, already a star, agreed to do the film - after George Raft turned it down, not wanting to trust his career to an unknown director.

African Queen - Jesus. What a film!

Key Largo - another great and atmospheric movie. I'll post about it later. Watched it from my sick-bed this weekend.

So anyway - Lauren Bacall, in her autobiography, talked a lot about Bogarts and Huston's working relationship. John Huston was, as Bacall said, "a genius, and I don't use that term lightly". But his "genius" came with all of the baggage: not wanting to be pinned down, absolutely rootless - had no sense of place or home - didn't care if he went over on a film - because he had no one to come home to (or - if he did, wife, kids, whatever - he didn't care). Humphrey Bogart was just the opposite. He was a homebody, especially after he married Bacall and had kids. He didn't care about traveling, he didn't think Africa was "fascinating", he had no curiosity about it, nothing - he just wanted to do the damn movie, and then go home to his kids, and his yacht.

So Huston and Bogart often clashed - but they also kept each other on their toes.

Bogart said that Huston pushed actors to "go beyond themselves" - that he always found himself taking bigger risks, when Huston was at the helm. He loved working with a director who pushed him.

And Huston, a precursor to Coppola I suppose, and Michael Cimino, and other flamboyant extravagant directors, would never finish a movie, EVER, if someone didn't keep him on track. Bogart was usually that person. He would keep Huston on schedule. "Okay, let's finish up with this scene today - we've definitely gotten what we need ... Let's move on."

Bogart loved acting. But he loved hanging out at home, too. He wouldn't want to stay on location for 18 months. He was a professional, and loved his home-life.

Before filming began for Sierra Madre, Bogart had entered his beloved yacht "The Santana" into some kind of big yacht race, in Honolulu. "The Santana" was his greatest passion in life, besides his passion for Bacall and for acting. He got a professional crew, he was so excited, he blocked out the time ... it was something to look forward to, immediately following the filming.

Huston, though, showed no compunction for staying on schedule.

Bogart had made it perfectly clear: "I have a yacht race on such and such a date - You have to be finished with me by then."

Huston: "Oh, of course, of course."

Filming crept by, they were further and further behind schedule, and Bogart was getting more and more anxious.

"John - you promised. I have to be in Honolulu by such-and-such."

Huston kept putting him off: "You will be! You will be!"

Bogart finally exploded - when he realized that no way on EARTH would this film come in on schedule. "You BASTARD - YOU PROMISED - YOU'VE BEEN DICKING AROUND IN THIS DESERT LONG ENOUGH..."

Needless to say, Bogart missed his race.

But his friendship with Huston survived. Bacall asked Huston to give the eulogy at Bogart's funeral.

And under Huston's direction, Bogart gave some of his most memorable performances.

Obsession Central: Treasure of the Sierra Madre

So like I said: I've been very very sick for the past 3 days. Bed-ridden kind of sick. My rib-cage actually hurts.

One advantage of illness, is that you can watch 3 movies a day, while lolling about in your pajamas, and feel very little guilt. I mean, I do that normally, but when I'm sick, I feel even less guilt.

This weekend, I watched "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" - which, no doubt, is a great great favorite with many people out there.

What a fantastic movie - quite ahead of its time, I think. Ahead of its time because of the darkness of the story, its ambiguities, its lack of redemption at the end ... the pointlessness of it all - the nihilism ... and then the roaring laughter as they realize that all their gold has blown away ...

I loved it. The acting is so good, all around, that you want to eat it up with a big spoon. YUM.

Roger Ebert puts this film on the Best Movies Ever Made list. Most other reviewers do as well, and it is in the Top 100 Films Ever Made, chosen by the AFI.

I loved Roger Ebert's words on the movie. Here is the review in total, for those who are interested.

The excerpts I like, though:

It tells this story with gusto and Huston's love of male camaraderie, and it occasionally breaks into laughter -- some funny, some bitterly ironic. It happens on a sun-blasted high chaparral landscape, usually desolate, except for the three gold prospectors, although gangs of bandits and villages of Indians materialize when required. At the end, it has Bogart in a delirious mad scene that falls somewhere between "King Lear" and "Greed."

Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, one of the movie characters everybody can name.

So true, huh?

The descent of his character into paranoia is, again, indicative of his greatness and also his lack of ego as an actor. He did not care about appearances. He cared about truth. Dobbs is a scary guy. A tragic guy.

And then - Ebert talks about Walter Huston - My God, who can ever forget Walter Huston's performance?? Wasn't he magnificent? It's deceptively simple, what he does. I watched his acting like a hawk, because the performance is now considered a classic performance, one of the great examples of movie-acting ... I feel like I could see the movie 20 times and still not get to the bottom of what makes Huston's acting so fantastic.

Ebert tries to analyze it too:

The performance is a masterpiece by Walter Huston, John's father, and won an Academy Award ... Listen to the way the senior Huston talks, rapid-fire, without pause, as if he's briefing them on an old tale and doesn't have time to waste on nuance. He does a famous dance when he finally finds gold, playing the stereotype of a grizzled prospector, but see how his eyes are sometimes quiet even when he's playing the fool; he reads every situation, knows his options, tries to slow Dobbs' meltdown.

That's part of it. He does "play the fool". It is like Huston is The Fool to Bogart's King Lear. And yet - of course - in this picture, as in Shakespeare, the Fool is always the wisest character of them all.

But Ebert ends his review with a discussion of the Dobbs character, as so fearlessly created by Humphrey Bogart:

I've seen "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" many times, but watching it again today on a new DVD, I found myself gripped as always by Bogart's closing scenes. The movie has never really been about gold but about character, and Bogart fearlessly makes Fred C. Dobbs into a pathetic, frightened, selfish man -- so sick we would be tempted to pity him, if he were not so undeserving of pity. The other two characters get more or less what they deserve at the end of the film, but with less satisfaction for the audience. After Howard is taken in by an Indian tribe, there is a gratuitous shot, where a young maiden pats his whiskers and he all but winks directly at the camera; this shot, and the idyllic village life surrounding it, belong in a lesser movie.

As the stories of Howard and Curtin evaporate into convention, however, Fred C. Dobbs somehow moves to a higher level of tragedy. Hearing things in the night, desperate for a drink of water, staggering under the desert sun with the gold he valued so much, Dobbs is the tragic hero brought down precisely by his flaws. There is a pitiless stark realism in these scenes that brings the movie to honesty and truth. Leading up to them is a down-market Shakespearean soliloquy when Dobbs thinks he is a murderer and says, "Conscience. What a thing! If you believe you got a conscience, it'll pester you to death. But if you don't believe you got one, what could it do to ya?" He finds out.

When Dobbs, after begging for money in the streets at the beginning of the film, uses the coins to get a shave and a haircut - there is a close-up of him, as he asks John Huston (the man in the white suit, also the director of the film - making a brief cameo) for money. He wants to go buy a whore, and so he has gotten himself gussied up.

But his hair is so thin, his face is so tragic and serious - he has his thin hair combed over to one side, sleeked, he is in his 50s, his face has all these lines, he has that weird almost buck-toothed mouth - and it is an unforgiving closeup, as he asks for money again.

He looks so pathetic. So ... old and unattractive.

Granted: Bogart wasn't your typical Good-looking Movie Star Guy. But still - this is the most unattractive and pathetic you will ever see him. Bogart rarely played pathetic guys, guys your heart aches for even though you would not want to spend one minute in their presence ...

It's a brave performance - completely successful - and yes, it is tragic in its scope.

Trivia about the film:

Humphrey Bogart and John Huston worked many times together - pretty much always to very very famous results.

Maltese Falcon - which has to be one of the most impressive directorial debuts in motion picture history. Bogart, already a star, agreed to do the film - after George Raft turned it down, not wanting to trust his career to an unknown director.

African Queen - Jesus. What a film!

Key Largo - another great and atmospheric movie. I'll post about it later. Watched it from my sick-bed this weekend.

So anyway - Lauren Bacall, in her autobiography, talked a lot about Bogarts and Huston's working relationship. John Huston was, as Bacall said, "a genius, and I don't use that term lightly". But his "genius" came with all of the baggage: not wanting to be pinned down, absolutely rootless - had no sense of place or home - didn't care if he went over on a film - because he had no one to come home to (or - if he did, wife, kids, whatever - he didn't care). Humphrey Bogart was just the opposite. He was a homebody, especially after he married Bacall and had kids. He didn't care about traveling, he didn't think Africa was "fascinating", he had no curiosity about it, nothing - he just wanted to do the damn movie, and then go home to his kids, and his yacht.

So Huston and Bogart often clashed - but they also kept each other on their toes.

Bogart said that Huston pushed actors to "go beyond themselves" - that he always found himself taking bigger risks, when Huston was at the helm. He loved working with a director who pushed him.

And Huston, a precursor to Coppola I suppose, and Michael Cimino, and other flamboyant extravagant directors, would never finish a movie, EVER, if someone didn't keep him on track. Bogart was usually that person. He would keep Huston on schedule. "Okay, let's finish up with this scene today - we've definitely gotten what we need ... Let's move on."

Bogart loved acting. But he loved hanging out at home, too. He wouldn't want to stay on location for 18 months. He was a professional, and loved his home-life.

Before filming began for Sierra Madre, Bogart had entered his beloved yacht "The Santana" into some kind of big yacht race, in Honolulu. "The Santana" was his greatest passion in life, besides his passion for Bacall and for acting. He got a professional crew, he was so excited, he blocked out the time ... it was something to look forward to, immediately following the filming.

Huston, though, showed no compunction for staying on schedule.

Bogart had made it perfectly clear: "I have a yacht race on such and such a date - You have to be finished with me by then."

Huston: "Oh, of course, of course."

Filming crept by, they were further and further behind schedule, and Bogart was getting more and more anxious.

"John - you promised. I have to be in Honolulu by such-and-such."

Huston kept putting him off: "You will be! You will be!"

Bogart finally exploded - when he realized that no way on EARTH would this film come in on schedule. "You BASTARD - YOU PROMISED - YOU'VE BEEN DICKING AROUND IN THIS DESERT LONG ENOUGH..."

Needless to say, Bogart missed his race.

But his friendship with Huston survived. Bacall asked Huston to give the eulogy at Bogart's funeral.

And under Huston's direction, Bogart gave some of his most memorable performances.

Obsession Central: Bogart

Watched a very strange movie last night: Dark Passage. Anyone seen it? It doesn't quite work, for some reason. The ending, which should be the most romantic exciting thing in the world, was a bit flat. But there are definitely wonderful moments.

The movie left me a bit blue, truth be told.

Obsession Central: Casablanca

Humphrey Bogart said:

"Of course, I did nothing in Casablanca that I hadn't done in twenty movies before that, and suddenly they discover I'm sexy. Any time that Ingrid Bergman looks at a man, he has sex appeal."

Obsession Central: Casablanca

Ingrid Bergman desperately wanted to get out of making the film. So did Humphrey Bogart. Nobody knew that Casablanca was going to end up spanning decades and lasting ... At the time, it was just another movie, being churned out by the studio. No big deal, nothing special.

This one had some special problems, though.

Bogart was primarily concerned with the fact that the script, when they began shooting, had no ending. Bergman was concerned about that, too - and with good reason. Without knowing the ending, and who she is supposed to end up with ... how was she supposed to play her scenes? Did she love Rick? Or was she just using him for the Letters of Transit? Did she love Victor? Blah blah ... Of course, the very ambiguity of the whole thing, and Ingrid Bergman not knowing the ending herself is - I think - one of the reasons why the film is so perfect, and still so cherished. None of us know the ending of our own stories. Half of us are running around, thinking we're in love with one, and then we realize: Oh wait, no, I don't love him ... I love him ... How many of us are absolutely clear at all times? (And if you are absolutely clear in your conviction at all times, you would make a terrible fictional character, boring and predictable. In my opinion, the character of Victor doesn't withstand the test of time as well as Ilse and Rick do - because of that absolute black and white clarity at all times.) Ambiguity, mystery, and CONFLICT, above all, is what we remember, and what an audienc relates to. It can't have been a pleasant experience for Bergman, since she was such a specific actress - but I think not knowing the end adds to the mystery of her performance. We never know if we should trust her or not.

But the other reason why Bergman didn't want to do the film, is that she was convinced she was miscast.

She and Bogart had lunch together before they started shooting - and Geraldine Fitzgerald (a wonderful actress, also under contract at Warner Brothers - anyone ever see the great film "The Pawnbroker", with Rod Steiger? She's in that) sat with them.

Fitzgerald describes Bogart's concern and anxiety about the lack of an ending.

And Bergman kept saying, "I am miscast. Why doesn't anyone care that I am so miscast? The script says: 'We have never had a woman so beautiful come to Casablanca'. But I look like a milkmaid. No one will ever believe it."

I kind of love her for that. "I look like a milkmaid."

Obsession Central: Lauren Bacall

When Lauren Bacall was 17, she modeled for a season for the designers on 7th Avenue. By her own admission, she was not very good at it. Here is what she said, when she came to do a seminar at my school:

"I was flat-chested and very skinny. The clothes of that time just didn't look good on me."

If you think of how female body-types go in and out of fashion, you can see that she is quite right, as gorgeous as she is. Her body-type is actually "in" now. But the clothes didn't hang right on her shoulders, she had slim hips, etc. Not at all right for the time.

However - she happened to meet a man during this time who arranged an introduction with Diana Vreeland, legendary fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar at the time.

(Bogie and Bacall freaks will know this story by heart, I realize. If I skip anything essential, please let me know...But I am just telling the story as she told it to us.)

Diana Vreeland, who was a bit of a visionary, actually - saw something in the teenage "Betty". Now it is obvious that Vreeland saw what it was in her that would captivate an audience. She saw the "star" - the star that was already there.

So Vreeland put Betty Bacall on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. I have been Googling like an insane person to try to find the image - because it's amazing. But I can't find it. (I know that by stating that it is like sprinkling blood in front of a vampire ... Now it will be a race to see who finds me the image first...) [Update: FOUND IT.]

I believe the photo was taken in 1941 or 1942 - and she was standing in front of a huge Red Cross. It is an arresting image. She has a flat blank face, she stares straight at the camera - there is nothing coy about her. Her skin is pale, her lips are bright red. Again: she doesn't quite look like what models looked like in that time period. She looks like what models look like now. There is a very clear identity on her face - you can see her personality - which models didn't quite have at that time. Think of the runway models now - how they stalk right at you - with this flat blank "Yeah, this is who I am" stare. That was what Bacall looked like on that cover.

The Harper's Bazaar cover was, as Bacall described it to us, "the twist of fate that changed my life forever".

Slim Hawks, wife of the famous film director Howard Hawks (who directed "Bringing Up Baby" with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn - one of my favorite movies of all time - and which was the basis for another one of my favorite movies of all time - "What's Up Doc?") saw the photo of Betty Bacall and showed it to her husband.

"What do you think of her? Do you think you could do something with her?"

He was relatively unimpressed (or so he said) - but the picture made enough of an impression on him to ask her to come out to Hollywood for a screen test.

Just a general test. In those days, they just put actors under contracts. You were under contract to one studio - yes, they could loan you out to other studios - but the studios controlled actors lives. There's a story in the book I just read (The Making of Casablanca) that describes Bogart pleading with Jack Warner to let him have two weeks off in between films. Warner told him, "No way. We need to start on such and such a date." Imagine a studio-head treating Tom Cruise that way!! Bogart was the biggest star of his day and he had to beg for a vacation!

So anyway. Betty Bacall came out and did her screen test.

Howard Hawks became a bit obsessed with Betty. Not in a creepy way. But he (according to Bacall) had a fantasy about women, and a fantasy about how they should be on screen.

Bacall went into this in a major way when she came and talked at my school.

This is a paraphrase of what she said:

"Hawks had an ideal in his head, of what women should be. He knew that when you are playing a dramatic scene, it is customary that your voice rises. He didn't want that. He always wanted, no matter how dramatic the circumstances were, that my voice should stay in the lower register. He felt that women - in scenes with men - should not behave like women, but they should behave more like men. And answer back. Be completely equal to the man. Which was, of course, unheard of at the time. And he came to see me as the epitome of that fantasy. He wanted me to be the mystery woman, the girl who could not be pegged."

Someone asked Bacall:

"So he wanted someone who could be as tough as Bogie?"

Bacall immediately corrected the assumption:

"Not tough. Not tough. Insolent. He wanted me to give as good as I got."

I love that.

Hawks immediately put Betty Bacall under contract. It was just a matter of time before he found the right material for this strange skinny insolent teenage girl. That film, of course, was "To Have and Have Not".

But before that came along - Hawks was very careful about her. He wanted her to maintain a sense of mystery and power. She was not just another starlet. He wanted to orchestrate her career- which he ended up doing - brilliantly.

Here is how Bacall described one of her conversations with Hawks (I love this!!! It epitomizes, beautifully, how so often we do not know what is best for us ... It is only in retrospect that we understand). Bacall said to us:

"Hawks said to me, 'I have a feeling that you would be great in a movie with either Cary Grant ... or Humphrey Bogart.' And I thought to myself, 'Ooooooh, Cary Grant! That sounds like a good idea!!"

We all roared. Because, of course, Hawks ended up casting her in "To Have and Have Not" with Bogie - and the rest is history.

One last thing about Bacall:

When she came to my school, she said to us that she had spent the majority of her life "quaking in fear". Hard to imagine, but true. At every step along the way, she had huge obstacles to overcome - of fear, shyness, self-confidence problems ... She was terrified to meet Diana Vreeland. She was terrified to meet Howard Hawks. She was terrified of what would happen to her after Bogie died. She was terrified to star in "Applause" on Broadway – the musical version of All About Eve (she ended up winning the first of two Tonys by the way)

Her fear, at times, was so great that her head would actually shake back and forth a bit, in a slight tremor.

The only way Bacall found to stop this tremor - was to lower her chin. Keep her chin low. No matter what. This became known as "her look". Her signature look of insolence and strength of character.

But it all originally was just a solution to stop her fearful shaking head.

Beautiful. True courage.

Obsession Central: The Caine Mutiny

Thanks to Bill McCabe - for sending me his copy of The Caine Mutiny - which I watched a couple nights ago.

I actually don't think I've ever seen the film in its entirety. But the main character - Capt. Queeg - is, through osmosis, emblazoned in my mind, my psyche, anyway. Rolling the silver balls around in his hand, paranoid, insane, under cross-examination. The scene is referenced often, and for good reason.

The movie has one problem: LOSE THE LOVE STORY. It was a big yawn - I'm sure it was the typical movie-makers ploy of any plot dominated by men. They feared that women wouldn't see it, without a little bit of nookie goin' on.

Actually, come to think of it, that was probably why I never saw the film before. Because of the highly reasonable (snicker) and not-thought-out gut-level response of: "Where are all the girls??"

This is why it took me 15 years to get around to really reading "Moby Dick". Which is a shame.

The Caine Mutiny would have been much better if they had cut the girl out!!

But that opinion aside:

What I REALLY need to talk about is Bogie. Surprise surprise.

The famous cross-examination scene is rightly famous. What you see is a man disintegrating under pressure. The facade of his reasoning cracks, and Bogie lets you see the chaos and paranoia inside. I re-wound it again and again, watching it like a lunatic, asking myself the question: "How ...how does he do it?"

The disintegration takes place in one take. Which is (in my wee opinion) the mark of a true actor. A lesser actor would not be able to pull such a feat off, in continuum. The director would need to call "Cut" - and give the actor a second to get to the NEXT phase of the disintegration - and then "Cut" again ... But a real actor could actually go through the disintegration - could actually let the camera reveal the crack-up.

This is what he does.

It's brilliant. It's masterful. It took my breath away.

At first, he is cool, reasonable, logical. He has all the answers. 5 minutes later, we see that that quality of his ("having all the answers") is the very thing that makes him paranoid and insane. But Bogie doesn't tip his hand too early. He holds his cards close to his chest. Which is why I think his work is still so revered today, and will continue to be so. He holds back. He doesn't show all. People who show all are boring - and also - their work has a tendency to not withstand the test of time.

It is when Jose Ferrer (the great prosecutor - great acting job, there) brings up the infamous "missing strawberries" that Queeg's veneer cracks.

But again - it's subtle. Bogie would never chew the scenery. He had too much humility.

The second the strawberries come up, he puts his hand in his pocket, reaching for his security blanket - the little rolling silver balls. But again - he's not doing it as a "bit", or as a wink to the audience, like: "Heh heh, watch me go craaaazy now!!" He does it, because it is what the character would do in that moment. But the second they come out, you know the jig is up.

And he starts to ramble on ... about the grave problem of "pilfering food" on a warship ... all the while, you can hear the nutso "click-click-click-click" of the rolling balls as he talks.

Watch the scene again.

Watch how Bogie pauses - very slightly - before and after the words "geometric logic" ... It is there where you can see the genius of the man.

Queeg is rambling on and on about the conspiracy of the ship to make him look like a fool, and he defends his behavior, in terms of the missing strawberries ... and in the middle of it ... he says that he "proved" with "geometric logic" that such-and-such occurred ... but there's a pause before and after. He is trying to think of the right words, he is trying to show how smart he is ... so he thinks for a teeny bit ... and then sputters out "geometric logic" - Bogie makes it look as though it is coming from off the top of his head, even though you know that they began as lines on the page. The way he does it is SCARY.

Here's the exact wording of the speech:

Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I'd have produced that key if they hadn't of pulled the Caine out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officers...

Madness is frightening, in all its forms ... and that "geometric logic" is terrifying.

By the end of the speech it is as though Queeg, suddenly, hears himself ... and realizes how long he has been speaking ... (all with the scary click-click-click of the rolling balls, an accompaniment to the scene) ... and, with this ... unbelievably touching look on his face - he subsides.

"Touching". That is not the right word at all.

It's more like "tragic".

I can't pin it down. Queeg hears himself, for the first time, as other people hear him. He is saddened, frightened ... he will lose much ... He knows he has just lost.

In that second, a slight shadow, from outside the window, darkens his brow. It's subtle, not a big moment, not a big "HERE IS THE SUBTEXT" moment. But it is there, and it says it all.

A shadow on this man's brain.

An absolutely great piece of acting. Truly masterful.

Oh, and one last thing: In a weird way, I felt very very sorry for Captain Queeg. I really did. I don't know if I have ever felt sorry for a Humphrey Bogart character before - even in Casablanca when he is so tormented - but I felt bad for Queeg.

Obsession Central

I am now devouring a book called The Making of Casablanca. I will be sharing some anecdotes with you ... because I know many of you are fans.

Michael Curtiz, the director, was apparently a demanding terrifying (and also highly talented, obviously) son-of-a-bitch who hated actors and who, according to his stepson, "spoke five languages, and all of them badly."

Ha!!!

Anyway, Curtiz was shooting one scene where Claude Rains enters the cafe. Curtiz was only kind and deferential to Bergman during the shoot, everyone else cowered in fear, or hid in their dressing rooms. Bogie drank and played chess by mail with a correspondent in Brooklyn in his dressing room - Bogie also was hiding from his terrifying 3rd wife, a drunkard, who used to beat the crap out of him. Smack him across the face in a drunken rage, etc. Bogie was standing around on the set, and one of the crew members said to another crew member: "Hey, wanna see me make Bogie jump?" Not believing anything could ruffle Bogie, the other crew member said "Sure." So original crew member walked over and said, "Hey, Bogie, your wife's here." And Bogie would jump, startled, looking around anxiously.

Thank God he dumped THAT broad!

More of that obsessive nonsense will be forthcoming as I go through the book.

So the scene was a simple scene: All Claude Rains had to do was walk into the cafe.

He did it.

Curtiz asked him to do it with more energy.

Claude Rains entered the cafe again, with "more energy".

Curtiz still wasn't pleased, and said, "Please. Do it again. More energy."

Claude Rains tried it again, tried it with more energy.

Curtiz, now visibly annoyed, said, "Do it again. More energy this time."

Claude Rains gave it another go.

Curtiz shook his head. "Again. More energy, dammit, more energy!!"

Claude Rains, now nearing the end of his rope, tried his entrance one more time, putting ALL of his energy into the entrance.

Curtiz growled, "Nope. Do it again. More energy."

Completely fed up with being unable to please Curtiz, Rains "did it again" - only this time, he rode into the cafe on a bicycle.

Obsession Central

Watched "The Big Sleep" last night.

Holy crap.

SO GOOD. So SEXY. It's amazing what they were able to slip past the censors. It's quite bold - actually bolder than films today, where everybody runs around naked, and nobody thinks anything of it.

Consider the scene when Bogart goes into the antique book shop ...and asks the shop girl questions about the storeowner across the street. Whom he is investigating.

It's a genius scene.

He and the shopgirl end up talking about rare books, but all along there is this crazy chemistry going on - He tells her to take off her glasses. When she does, he looks at her, and drawls, "Hellooo."... He takes a flask out of his pocket, she takes down two paper cups, grins at him in this insouciant way, walks over to the main door, pulls down the blind, and turns the sign to "Closed".

Fade out. No kiss. No nothing.

The next scene - it is an hour later (Bogart was waiting for the store owner across the street to return) - and Bogart leaves the antique book shop, saying something tender and cynical to her, "Sugar, thanks for the information..." The event is not judged. She is obviously a good person, a nice person. She's not a slut, a devil-character. She's a shop-girl with glasses. She is not judged. And neither is he. It's quite amazing, actually.

I thought: "Jesus. They just slept together. It is so OBVIOUS. They are strangers, they have a drink, they have an afternoon quickie - and nobody gets killed or pilloried or tarred and feathered for it..."

There are many examples like that in the film.

Lauren Bacall has this long fantastic speech about horse-racing, (Michael??) - she and Bogart are talking about how they love to go to horse races.

But that is NOT what they are talking about.

They are feeling each other out, they are trying to figure out if they should "bet" on each other. But nothing overt is said. It's so sexy. And it's from a Raymond Chandler story - so the dialogue is superb.

She says she likes to watch the races to see who takes the lead first ... but sometimes the best horse is the one who "comes from behind..."

Er ... what?

He laughs, too, when she says that. He laughs at the analogy. There is no coyness. They know what they're talking about.

I loved how, in the first scene, when Bogart comes to meet Mr. Sternwood - who wants to hire him to investigate his own daughter, among other things - but anyway, Mr. Sternwood is dying, and has built a sweltering greenhouse in the back, where he sits all day in a wheelchair. The heat helps him.

Bogart comes into that environment - and as the scene progresses - you can watch Bogart get hotter and hotter. It's so subtle - and Bogart would have been completely in charge of the progression of that. No director will ever remind you: "Now remember - it's hot!!" Bogart would have known that, instinctively. You can watch his discomfort grow. And when he exited the scene - there were huge sweat stains on the back of his shirt.

The film was done in 1946 ... and not often were stars, in those days, supposed to look un-shaven, sweaty, disheveled, what have you.

But this was Warner Brothers, first of all - a studio known for making gritty dark pictures. So maybe that was part of it.

I noticed the sweat stain immediately. In fact, I looked for it. It's the kind of stuff actors notice. I also noticed that he is then called in to meet with the Lauren Bacall character - and the sweat stain is still there, through the scene.

This is a very rare dose of reality, and human-ness - for the pictures of those times - and for a star of such magnitude as Bogart. It helps the movie. It keeps it grounded.

And then there's a sexy sexy moment when Bogart gives Lauren Bacall permission to scratch her knee. It's so good. I re-wound it 3 times. She sits on his desk, and I noticed, the first time through, her hand ... kind of idly circling on her knee ... it didn't call attention to itself, but I did notice it.

They continue to converse. She continues to gently circle her hand on her knee.

Finally, he says, in this bemused way (without ever having looked directly at her hand or her knee), "Go ahead. You can scratch it."

She freezes, embarrassed. And then, quickly, she pulls up the hem of her skirt, quickly and furiously scratches her thigh, pulls the skirt back down, and continues on with the scene.

It's a beautiful moment, beautifully realized.

Anyway. Great film. So much fun.

Obsession Central

Forgive me. The storm will pass. Someday. But in the meantime:

Some random facts about my latest obsession, collated from IMDB.

There is some dispute as to how Bogey's lip injury occurred. Another story of how Bogart got his trademark lisp: Bogart was a young guard for the Navy, and when a prisoner he was escorting attempted to escape, he hit Bogart in the face with his shackles. Bogart, fearing that he would lose his position and be severely punished for letting a prisoner escape, chased down the prisoner and brought him successfully to the Portsmouth Naval Prison. However because the surgeon who stitched up his face did not do a very good job, Bogart was left with his trademark lisp. Another version has it that he caught a large wood splinter in his lip at the age of twelve, but the combat story is more exciting.

This one cracked me up:

German dubbers translated his famous quote "Here's looking at you, kid" as "Ich schau' dir in die Augen, Kleines." which means "I look into your eyes, little one".

Doesn't quite have the same resonance, huh? Reminds me of the purposefully bad subtitles in Kill Bill. Hysterical.

The following trivia tidbit made my heart crack:

Played chess by mail with GIs during WWII.

And this:

His coffin contains a small, gold whistle, put there by his wife, Lauren Bacall.

Anyone who's seen "To Have and Have Not" will know what that whistle signifies. Damn.

And of course:

Ranked #1 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest screen actors.

Lauren Bacall had this to say about being widowed, and grieving his death:

"Bogie himself said that dead is dead and life is for the living and you've got to move on - and if you don't, it's self-indulgent and does the dead no good. He said it dishonoured them because if they gave you so little care for your own life, then they didn't leave you with very much."

She came and did a seminar at my school, and talked a lot about what he taught her. I have it on tape ... I will have to dig it up from somewhere.

Why? BECAUSE I AM OBSESSED.

Bogie had this to say about Lauren Bacall:

"She's a real Joe. You'll fall in love with her like everybody else."

And of course, he and his wife openly and actively protested the harassment of Hollywood by the HUAC. Bogie had this to say about what they were doing to his colleagues:

"They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem."

I love the following quote, it's so realistic:

"I came out here with one suit and everybody said I looked like a bum. Twenty years later Marlon Brando came out with only a sweatshirt and the town drooled over him. That shows how much Hollywood has progressed."

And apparently, these were Bogie's last words:

"I should never have switched from scotch to martinis."

Ruminations on Humphrey Bogart and the healthiness of celebrity crushes

I admit it. I'm having a little bit of a problem.

I am getting obsessed with Humphrey Bogart. The love is gone, folks. The obsession blossoms. I can feel it growing. Like some beautiful poisonous plant, expanding exponentially.

This is a very familiar sensation to me, as I have had INTENSE celebrity crushes since the first achey twinges of puberty.

And maybe because I have a little bit of a complex about being "too much" for whatever guy I've been involved with (and I'm not delusional, by the way - More than one man has said to me, point-blank, "You're a bit much" ... One actually said to me, in kind of a dry tone, "I guess I feel that dating you is too much for one man, and I feel like I need to call in some help". My point is is that my complex does not exist in a vacuum) ... maybe because of all of that, my celebrity crushes get ALL of my passion. I will never be "too much" for them!

Maybe this should be an embarrassing admission, but it's not. At least I don't feel embarrassed.

Let me go to a deeper level for a moment:

Like most of us, I have gone through some rough seasons. Seasons where all I could do was try to believe my friends and family when they would say, "There is light at the end of the tunnel." One such rough season was a couple of years ago, directly prior to starting up my blog in 2002. This "season" was different from others I have experienced, because it showed no sign of ending. A grey blanket lay over the world.

Now, multiple things went into me climbing out of the black pit ... one was starting the blog, randomly. I talk about that a bit here.

But another thing was seeing "Moulin Rouge" and succumbing, whole-heartedly, to a "crush" on Ewan McGregor which - it's hard to describe without feeling silly. Maybe people think because I wear leather jackets and have a tattoo that I'm a tough chick, and on many levels I am. You must not mess with me. I do not give too many second chances. But on another level I am really just a delicate soul and the tough facade is necessary because I'm all shattered-up inside. Like that great Bonnie Raitt line: "She's fragile like a string of pearls. She's nobody's girl." There's nobody tougher than someone who's been messed about, and who has survived a couple of dark seasons.

Okay, so I'm going to stop being embarrassed at what I want to write. Because who knows - maybe somebody out there will relate, maybe somebody out there will read what I write and think: "Wow, I know just what she means!!" - and that's who I'm writing for right now.

In 2002 I lay on my couch for 5 months. That was it. That was all I could do. The reasons why are multi-faceted, one thing folding into another, and I can't really explain it without talking for 2 hours. It wasn't that I was depressed. It was that I felt nothing. Everything went dead and dull and grey. The spinning top of life slowed down to a complete standstill. And so I rented movies. That was all I was able to do. All the energy I had.

I don't remember much of that year.

Then I saw "Moulin Rouge" and it was as though I had been plunged from the sunlight into ice cold water. It was like being born again. That is how intense it was. I watched the film and here, exactly, is how I felt (and it won't be all that articulate, but I'm sure you will get my meaning, coming, as I was, from my dark season of nothingness):

oh my God ... love exists ... love exists ... I can feel it in my heart again ... it is real ... it is real ... maybe not for me ... but it is out there ... and maybe ... maybe ... I will feel that again ... maybe ... it's not IMPOSSIBLE ... it's not IMPOSSIBLE ...

(The second you stop believing things are "impossible" is the second that the dark season ends.)

I will always have a soft space in my heart for that film because of what it provided me. It helped bring me back to life.

Ewan McGregor was the vehicle of that awakening.

I think sometimes that there are certain performances which shift the tectonic plates a little bit, and make me get my eyes up above the muck of my own life. This is one of the beautiful and healing things about theatre/art/movies, what-ever.

I can track certain eras of my life based on whichever "crush" I had going at that time.

"Crush" is appropriate, only if you think of it in terms of what the word 'crush' actually MEANS. Being "crushed" is no picnic - it would hurt to be crushed, in actuality. My teenage celeb crushes (Ralph Macchio, Lance Kerwin - does anyone remember that name??? James Dean...) were barely fun. I could barely talk about these people. There was nothing casual about any of it. I NEEDED these people. I NEEDED to know that there was good in the world, and that maybe some of that good would come my way some day. To me, these young actors embodied that. James Dean's performance in "East of Eden" - I can't be too dramatic about this - it changed how I looked at life. It changed how I looked at acting, yes - but more than that: I got my eyes above the emotional-paucity of high school, of feeling alone, of feeling ugly, of feeling on the outside of things, of wanting desperately for love and approval and acceptance ... and I felt: There. THERE. There is a PERFECT expression of EXACTLY what I am going through. He has DONE it. He has SAID it. What a comfort!

Certain books can do this as well. It can usher you through a rough patch, it can let you know: "It's okay, this is well-traveled ground..." Not in a heartless, "Buck up, kid, life sucks, and it sucks for everyone" way. But in a way that lets you know you are not alone. You have not invented heartbreak.

And this, too, shall pass.

With James Dean - with Ralph Macchio - with Han Solo (not Harrison Ford, really, but Han Solo) - there was no more scarcity. There was only abundance. I already had a complex in high school that I would be "too much" - and the sterility of my high-school romantic life seemed proof of that. So whenever I had a crush on a "real" guy, 90% of my energy went to keeping myself in line, with holding back, with not letting him know how much I REALLY felt, for fear of scaring him off ... whatever.

Putting the reins on my own behavior - had the inverse effect of putting the reins on what was going on inside. I was always "in line".

There is no abundance. If I lose control, I do so very very privately.

This is kind of who I am, I guess - and how I've lived my life. I've lost men I love because of this nonsense.

Over the years, like the tide going in or going out, I succumb to random "crushes" on actors. (As will be obvious by now: one of the things I love about these crushes, is I can let myself go without any repercussions.) Usually the crush comes upon me suddenly, catching me unawares. Like: I randomly rented "Fisher King" one night some years back, and suddenly - as though I were riding a wave into shore - I became overWHELMED by Jeff Bridges. OVERWHELMED, and suddenly I needed to see every damn movie the man had ever made in his life.

Usually, with these actors, I have already seen a lot of their films ... but ... for whatever reason ... I was never "struck" by them. Obsession did not bloom.

And suddenly, whaddya know, there I am renting films where Jeff Bridges has 2 lines.

It's like an assignment. I take it seriously.

"Okay. So I'm into Jeff Bridges now. Fine. It is a fact. I must accept it, and not fight it. And now I must set myself a syllabus, in order to handle and focus this out-of-control obsessive energy - give it a POINT."

And then I'm off to the races.

One couple of months it was Russell Crowe. I guess I'm the same as 85% of the other women on this planet ... but there I was, renting the kids movie he made in New Zealand about the silver horse ... and The Quick and the Dead ... all because ... dammit ... seeing the man provided me with something.

Seeing him in "The Sum of Me" (one of my favorite films that he did - before he became a star) got me through many a dark hour. His character in that film - I related to it so much, even though he plays a jocky gay kid from New Zealand, and I (to put it mildly) was none of those things. He's tender, inside - he's kind of shy - he's looking for something - he's got no self-confidence ... It's a beautiful performance. One night I watched "The Sum of Me" back to back with "LA Confidential" and that convinced me: "Okay. This guy is a GIANT talent. GIANT. I have absolutely NO idea who he is now."

Ewan McGregor's almost operatic performance in Moulin Rouge convinced me that life would, indeed, go on ... and not only would I actually "feel" stuff again ... but that I would actually experience things in bright vibrant colors again. The color scheme of the movie.

The movie validated my despair. It said to me, "Life is tremendously unfair sometimes, and love rarely feels good, and you will be changed FOREVER by loving someone fully ..."

The dark season came about because, basically, I no longer felt that I had the energy for such things. I could not put myself through it, ever again. And so the spinning top slowed down - and then stopped.

There is one song in the film - one moment - when the two of them are at a rehearsal - and they are singing a duet, trying to pretend that they're not in love, trying to hide what is going on, but they cannot ...

Now I've seen this movie hundreds of times, obviously - because the second I saw it, during the "dark season" I realized: "Health. This is health. What I feel now is healthy - because I FEEL it" - and so I just kept watching it. And I kept getting better, miraculously.

Ewan McGregor's face - during the scene I describe above - I mean, I've always thought he was a wonderful actor - inventive, funny, courageous, sexy ... but in that scene, all I saw was his openness. This ... vulnerability. But not in a wussy way. Just the openness in his heart. I think the openness in his heart shows so clearly in that scene because the character's main action is to try to HIDE it.

I watched that scene over and over and over, sometimes sitting on the floor in front of the television, trying to crawl into the screen.

Can I be that open again?

Can I be that open again?

I did not know the answers to those questions ... but watching the movie gave me the hope that the answer might be "Yes" and so I kept watching it.

When the dark season finally ended ... around November of 2002 ... I looked back on the Moulin Rouge orgy as though it were a particularly psychedelic dream. It didn't seem quite real - almost immediately following. And I don't think I've done a very good job in describing how bewitched I was by that film, and by Ewan McGregor in particular. Calling something like that a "celebrity crush" seems completely ... inadequate.

It was life-affirming. That was what it was.

It told me I was going to be okay. I was going to be okay.

And it's all in a continuum for me ... that was how I felt watching East of Eden, too. That was how I felt watching Han Solo, being snarky and smart-alecky, shooting across the universe, not giving a f***. These weren't just crushes like: "oooh, they're cute, I put my picture on the wall".

They helped me to go on.

And so now Bogart.

I just know that, throughout my life, when one of these obsessions sweep me away - it's always for a reason. A reason I usually won't understand until it's all over. "Oh, so that's what was going on then!"

The Moulin Rouge thing got me ready to join the land of the living again.

I couldn't just pick myself up by my boot straps - because, frankly, I have no boot straps and I don't even know what boot straps are.

I was immobile. I felt like my back had been broken, finally, by one too many disappointments. I gave up.

Moulin Rouge eased me back into life. That was its purpose, it was a harbinger. A harbinger of health, love, and living a messy open life again. It prepared me, again, to get the top spinning, to get off the couch, to (in the immortal words of that great Smiths song, written "for" me): Throw your homework onto the fire ... Come out and find the one that you love...

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a celebrity crush is just a celebrity crush.

But sometimes it's a signal (for me, anyway) that something else may, actually, be going on, something else needs to happen, perhaps it is time to move to the next level.

Last night I watched "To Have and Have Not".

Tonight? "Casablanca" again.

Bogie

Formulating a post right now (in my head) on Humphrey Bogart. I've seen most of his films - but a long time ago - (except for my Casablanca orgies every other month). So I am now going to make my way through all of them again.

This weekend, I saw "African Queen" and "The Maltese Falcon".

Have a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head right now about him, and what makes him so great ... if not the greatest.

While I get my thoughts together, talk amongst yourselves about Bogie. I'll be back.