Key Largo

Sunday, March 30, 2008

If there's one thing I've really been fucking up on my K2K, it's been trying to watch a broad range of movies. Instead, I keep falling into my usual nerd trap of obsessing over one actor, or director or genre or whatever. So here's another John Huston / Humphrey Bogart collaboration.

It's another pretty good tough guy flick, although I saw it under less than ideal conditions and maybe I would have liked it more in other circumstances. This one has the benefit of featuring Edward G. Robinson playing an evil bastard. In a nice, odd detail, they introduce his character sitting in a bathtub with a fan blowing on him.

This one is less un-PC than some of the other Huston films I've seen, and it in fact tries to shed a positive light on the native American characters. But they are also kind of relegated to plot device and victim roles, and it comes off as a little condescending. But it's a huge step above Bogart slapping Petter Lorre around in The Maltese Falcon because he's gay.

I wonder if this one had a different ending originally. There's a lot of talk about risking one's life to save others, and Bogart's character is reluctant to do so until the very end. He gets plugged during the final shootout, so I figured it was going to end with him dying nobly to save all the others. But then the film ends with him wounded, but alive and steering his boat back to Key Largo. Feels a little like something the studio might have insisted upon.

High Sierra

Friday, March 7, 2008

This is a reasonably entertaining early Humphrey Bogart movie, made just before he got big, co-written by the great John Huston. It's a tough guy crime movie with a few unfortunate cheesy elements (like the cute dog) and an offensive black stereotype (seems like all the old Bogart/Huston movies had some un-PC element, be it racism, homophobia, sexism, etc.), and a really bad ending that drags on for too long. Still, worth a watch if you like these kinds of movies for the stuff that does work, especially Bogart's performance.

Across the Pacific

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

When John Huston is on his game, he doesn't fuck around. For his directorial debut, he made The Maltese Falcon, which is not only my favorite detective movie of all time, but also probably my favorite tough-guy movie. The style and the character/performance of Sam Spade pretty much set the stage for every private eye movie to follow... almost all movie private eyes are either Spade clones, or deliberately unlike Spade. He is the epitome of the movie detective: a sleazy hardass with a personal moral code. Only Spade is way more of a bastard than other movies usually have the guts to make their lead.

So, following up on Falcon's success, he reunited with half the cast (Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet), and made a fun, relatively lightweight, sexist, racist spy-thriller about Bogart trying to stop an evil Japanese conspiracy while on a pleasure cruise.

Falcon is a pretty hard act to follow, so it's no surprise that this doesn't come close to living up to it. But I'm happy to report that it's still a pretty entertaining movie, maybe a little disposable, but the (obvious) chemistry of the cast goes a long way to helping it along.

I said it was racist, and I'm pretty sure it is, because every single damn Japanese person in the cast turns out to be part of the evil conspiracy, like it's The Wicker Man on a cruise ship. But at the same time, earlier scenes seem to make a genuine (if not an entirely insightful) attempt at showing respect to some Japanese customs and attitudes... maybe Huston is trying to show that he's not racist, I guess, but when all the Japanese turn out to be evil spies it kind of undercuts any earlier attempts at diplomacy.

Or maybe, just maybe, all the earlier stuff is just so Huston can mock pussy liberals who would be offended by blatantly demonizing the Japanese. I dunno.

Either way, the racism actually makes the movie a little extra interesting.

So, not a classic, but it's got some good visuals, good action, good acting, good fun , and unsettling racism.

To Have and Have Not

Monday, November 26 2007

This here is a 1944 Humphrey Bogart film directed by Howard Hawks, with a few superficial similarities to Casablanca. I dig Bogart a lot, with The Maltese Falcon being a particular favorite of mine.

But I’ll be honest, outside of some pretty good dialogue here and there, I wasn’t too keen on this one. The story is kind of slow, and for what seems to be an intrigue-filled thriller, it meanders a lot and is even boring at times. Even when the more exciting stuff is happening, like when Bogart has to perform impromptu surgery on a gunshot victim, it’s a little too low key and doesn’t generate any excitement.

I did like Bogart’s drunken sidekick. And Lauren Bacall is pretty good and obviously she and Bogart have great chemistry. But the romance seems really like a subplot or an afterthought, and you just don’t get caught up in everything like you do with Casablanca. And Bacall may be a looker, but she’s no Ingrid Bergman.

Of course, Casablanca is one of the great crowd-pleasers, and it’s not really fair to compare this film to it, even if it does seem like it’s trying to copy the formula a little. But taken on it’s own terms, it just isn’t very interesting. If you want a good Bogart/Bacall/Hawks team-up, I say stick with The Big Sleep.

So I’m still slowly working on seeing more Howard Hawks films, but this was one of my least favorites. I liked it more than His Girl Friday or (if you can count it) The Thing From Another World, but not as much as Bringing Up Baby, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo or El Dorado. Not a bad movie, just not good enough to recommend.