Gizmos, Gadgets, Noir and Steampunk
Lets you meet the cynical and obsessive heroes of film noir portrayed by actors like Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, James Cagney, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.
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The Maltese Falcon is still the tightest, sharpest, and most cynical of Hollywood’s official deathless classics, bracingly tough even by post-Tarantino standards. Humphrey Bogart is Dashiell Hammett’s definitive private eye, Sam Spade, struggling to keep his hard-boiled cool as the double-crosses pile up around his ankles. The plot, which dances all around the stolen Middle Eastern statuette of the title, is too baroque to try to follow, and it doesn’t make a bit of difference. The dialogue, much of it lifted straight from Hammett, is delivered with whip-crack speed and sneering ferocity, as Bogie faces off against Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet, fends off the duplicitous advances of Mary Astor, and roughs up a cringing “gunsel” played by Elisha Cook Jr. It’s an action movie of sorts, at least by implication: the characters always seem keyed up, right on the verge of erupting into violence. This is a turning-point picture in several respects: John Huston (The African Queen) made his directorial debut here in 1941, and Bogart, who had mostly played bad guys, was a last-minute substitution for George Raft, who must have been kicking himself for years afterward. This is the role that made Bogart a star and established his trend-setting (and still influential) antihero persona. –David Chute END
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Humphrey Bogart stars as Rip Murdock, a World War II veteran ensnared in a web of crime and conspiracy when his best friend, Johnny Drake (William Prince), disappears en route to Washington, D.C., to receive a war medal. Murdock follows the trail to Drake’s hometown in the Deep South, where he finds his friend’s body burned beyond recognition at the local morgue. Murdock, determined to find the murderer, begins his own investigation but soon falls for Drake’s ex-girlfriend, femme fatale Cory Chandler (Lizabeth Scott). When Murdock finds his first lead dead in his own hotel room, he begins to suspect that Chandler may be a lot more than just a local singer. Directed by acclaimed veteran John Cromwell (SO ENDS OUR NIGHT, ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS), DEAD RECKONING provides sharp and merciless suspense. The dark, winding plot twists in this classic film noir are held together and energized throughout by Bogart’s commanding, inimitable screen presence and his paradoxically expressive, world-weary deadpan.
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A movie that proved a fine swansong for Humphrey Bogart, The Harder They Fall is a gripping drama set against a background of fixed boxing matches. Not so much about the fights as the exploitation of the sport, the film is based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, whose Oscar-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront (1954) helped turn Rod Steiger into a star. Here Steiger delivers an equally bravura performance as the chillingly corrupt manager, Nick Benko, a man who will do anything to turn a buck. Bogart meanwhile is outstanding as unemployed sports writer Eddie Willis, hired against his better judgement to promote a no-hope Argentinean boxer, Toro Moreno (Mike Lane).
Powerfully written, if built around the unlikely premise of building a 10th-rate fighter into a world-class contender, the drama is essentially a battle for Willis’s soul as he is torn between money and conscience. Though the scenes with Bogart and Steiger facing off are the strongest and a veritable masterclass of hardboiled characterisation, Mark Robson, who also helmed the Kirk Douglas boxing classic Champion (1949), directs with a convincingly dirty realism, the final punishing and bloody match a clear influence on Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980).
On the DVD: The Harder They Fall‘s anamorphic 1.77:1 transfer is excellent with only one brief scene showing any significant print damage. Burnett Guffey’s noir-ish black-and-white cinematography looks sharp and fresh as the day it was shot, with only minimal grain. The mono sound is strong and clear, without a hint of distortion or compression. The only extra is a scored gallery of posters and lobby cards from other Bogart films available on Columbia. There are dubbed versions in French, German, Spanish and Italian, and a plethora of subtitle options. –Gary S Dalkin
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One of the classics of the noir psychological thriller, In a Lonely Place is one of Humphrey Bogart’s finest performances. He is almost unbearably intense as Dixon Steele, a screenwriter with high standards and a nasty temper who finds himself under suspicion when Mildred, a hat-check girl he knows, is found murdered. Immediately he gets an alibi from a neighbour, Laurel, and equally quickly, he recognises that this is a woman who meets his standards: the question is, as suspicion of his involvement in Mildred’s death continues, can he make himself meet hers?
This is a wonderful study in trust and suspicion and the limits of love; Bogart’s performance is impressive simply because he is prepared to go well over the limits of our sympathy in the name of emotional truth. The scene where he explains imaginatively to a cop and his wife how the murder might have happened is a spine-chilling, creepy portrait of amoral artistic brilliance. Gloria Grahame is equally fine as the woman who lets herself love him, for a while.
On the DVD: In a Lonely Place comes with an excellent documentary in which Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential) explains the importance of the film to him and discusses its place in the work of Bogart and the director Nicholas Ray; there is also a quick interesting documentary about the restoration and digitisation of classic films. The film is presented with a visual aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and with restored Dolby Surround sound that does full justice to the film’s snappy dialogue and the moody George Antheil score. –Roz Kaveney
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The Maltese Falcon is still the tightest, sharpest, and most cynical of Hollywood’s official deathless classics, bracingly tough even by post-Tarantino standards. Humphrey Bogart is Dashiell Hammett’s definitive private eye, Sam Spade, struggling to keep his hard-boiled cool as the double-crosses pile up around his ankles. The plot, which dances all around the stolen Middle Eastern statuette of the title, is too baroque to try to follow, and it doesn’t make a bit of difference. The dialogue, much of it lifted straight from Hammett, is delivered with whip-crack speed and sneering ferocity, as Bogie faces off against Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet, fends off the duplicitous advances of Mary Astor, and roughs up a cringing “gunsel” played by Elisha Cook Jr. It’s an action movie of sorts, at least by implication: the characters always seem keyed up, right on the verge of erupting into violence. This is a turning-point picture in several respects: John Huston (The African Queen) made his directorial debut here in 1941, and Bogart, who had mostly played bad guys, was a last-minute substitution for George Raft, who must have been kicking himself for years afterward. This is the role that made Bogart a star and established his trend-setting (and still influential) antihero persona. –David Chute
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Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made screen history together more than once, but they were never more popular than in this 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel, directed by Howard Hawks (To Have and Have Not). Bogart plays private eye Philip Marlowe, who is hired by a wealthy socialite (Bacall) to look into troubles stirred up by her wild, young sister (Martha Vickers). Legendarily complicated (so much so that even Chandler had trouble following the plot), the film is nonetheless hugely entertaining and atmospheric, an electrifying plunge into the exotica of detective fiction. William Faulkner wrote the screenplay. –Tom Keogh
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This 1941 melodrama is memorable both for its strong central performances and their intimations of how the previous decade’s crime dramas would evolve into film noir–no accident, given the solid direction of veteran Raoul Walsh and the hand of screenwriter John Huston, who teamed with the author of its novelistic source, WR Burnett (Little Caesar). In the central character of Roy “Mad Dog” Earle, a fictional peer to John Dillinger, Humphrey Bogart finds a defining role that anticipates the underlying fatalism and moral ambiguity visible in the career-making roles soon to follow, including Sam Spade in Huston’s directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Earle suggests a prescient variation on the enraged sociopaths that were fixtures of the gangster melodramas that shaped Bogart’s early screen image. Pardoned from a long prison stretch, the weary robber is clearly more eager to savour his new freedom than immediately swing back into action. But his early release has been engineered by a mobster who wants Earle to pull off a high-stakes burglary, setting in motion a plot that is a prototype for doomed heist capers–a small, yet potent sub-genre that would later include Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).
What gives High Sierra its power, however, isn’t the crime itself but Earle’s collision with the younger, brasher confederates picked to help him, and the hard-edged but vulnerable taxi dancer they’re competing for, played forcefully by Ida Lupino, who actually received top billing. Her attraction to the reluctant Earle is complicated by a convoluted sub-plot designed to showcase then starlet Joan Leslie, but the movie finally moves into its most gripping moments when the wounded Earle, pursued by police, flees ever higher toward the mountains. His final, suicidal showdown would become a clich&éacute; of sorts in lesser films, but here it provides a wrenching climax sealed by Lupino’s vivid final scene. –Sam Sutherland
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made screen history together more than once, but they were never more popular than in this 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel, directed by Howard Hawks (To Have and Have Not). Bogart plays private eye Philip Marlowe, who is hired by a wealthy socialite (Bacall) to look into troubles stirred up by her wild, young sister (Martha Vickers). Legendarily complicated (so much so that even Chandler had trouble following the plot), the film is nonetheless hugely entertaining and atmospheric, an electrifying plunge into the exotica of detective fiction. William Faulkner wrote the screenplay. –Tom Keogh
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