Humphrey Bogart - Film by Film Thread

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by FieldingMellish, Jul 6, 2012.

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  1. Hot Ptah

    Hot Ptah Forum Resident In Memoriam

    Location:
    Kansas City, MO

    That is a really good point--there are some good moments when Bogart the business tycoon starts to rediscover his humanity. Those scenes are powerful and genuine, and a compelling story. But then what does he do with this newly rediscovered humanity? He falls in love with Hepburn, which just does not work for me and does not seem plausible. Perhaps if after rediscovering his humanity, Bogart's character had fallen in love with a 45 year old English professor at Columbia University, or someone like that, it would have seemed realistic and poignant.

    But then it would have been a cult film, an art film, without a glamorous female lead to boost the box office.
     
  2. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

  3. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    Yes, the father provides welcome comic relief. But even William Holden - usually such an energizing presence - is dull here. Totally agree with your observation re. Bogart's character being too old in spirit, it's as if Bogie is having to act whilst wearing a strait-jacket. The role was originally intended for Cary Grant, who may well have been able to make a better accommodation with it, but even that would not have made this a good film.

    In the scenes that Bogart plays for laughs - the runup to the yachting trip you mention, in particular - we can enjoy him here. When he's playing straight adn romancing Hepburn, it's painful to watch.

    Overall, this film is a terrible waste of talent.
     
  4. Hot Ptah

    Hot Ptah Forum Resident In Memoriam

    Location:
    Kansas City, MO
    I think Cary Grant could have done a better job with the romance scenes, as he was convincing (to me) years later in "North by Northwest" in love scenes with a much younger actress. But I don't think Cary Grant could have played a convincing business tycoon who had let his personal life wither away. The scenes where Bogart thaws out and becomes more human again--I don't think that they would have seemed very credible with Cary Grant. He seemed to have a "life of the party" spirit about him no matter what he was doing, and it would have seemed like he was enjoying life even while concentrating intently on business.

    I agree that William Holden gave one of his least engaged and interesting performances here.
     
  5. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    True. Grant would have been wrong for the role too, in other ways.

    As someone said (not sure who or where): even firing on only one cylinder, Bogie easily out-performs Holden here.

    I do recall reading that Holden was a bit sniffy about Bogart's reputation and behaviour, complaining about Bogart's drinking, etc. Which is ironic given what eventually happened to Holden.
     
  6. Hot Ptah

    Hot Ptah Forum Resident In Memoriam

    Location:
    Kansas City, MO
    As disappointing as Sabrina is, it blows the remake with Harrison Ford out of the water.
     
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  7. kevinsinnott

    kevinsinnott Forum Coffeeologist

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    Wasn't this a film Bogart was very uncomfortable with? I think he felt he was too old for the romance with Hepburn.
     
  8. Hot Ptah

    Hot Ptah Forum Resident In Memoriam

    Location:
    Kansas City, MO
    I have read a quote from Bogart to the effect that, "If I was her, I would have picked Bill Holden instead of me!"
     
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  9. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    Heh. She'd have been better off with Walter Hampden.
     
  10. Hot Ptah

    Hot Ptah Forum Resident In Memoriam

    Location:
    Kansas City, MO
    He was the only member of the family with a personality.
     
  11. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    I can't for the life of me find the reference I mentioned earlier, where William Holden complained about Bogart basically bringing the acting profession into disrepute.

    Anyway Sabrina was a rotten shoot for Bogart. With Holden and Wilder already friendly, and Bogart suspecting (often correctly) that they were out to shaft him on various levels, including even the shooting angles used, the situation worsened when Holden and Wilder cosied up to Hepburn, the three of them meeting up for drinks after shooting finished each day, and not inviting Bogart. Imagine it! Arranging to meet for drinks and excluding probably the most famous drinker of all time....

    Bogart had held a grudge against Holden, all the way back to when he received lower billing to Holden in 'Invisible Stripes' in 1939, during the filming of which Holden had insisted - against Bogie's protestations - that he drive a motorcycle with Bogart in the sidecar, which he promptly crashed into a a wall.

    Bogart was ill, having coughing fits, and a number of shots - in which he had given good performances - were scrapped because Bogart's spitting was picked up by Wilder's back-lighting. Although the director and Bogart later apparently made up, they got on very badly indeed on set. At one stage, Bogart lost it and called Wilder "a kraut b*stard" and "a Nazi son of b1tch", which is the sort of outburst you read about Bogart's friend Frank Sinatra indulging in when riled - and a particularly unfortunate choice of words given the fact that Wilder was Jewish and his mother had died at Auschwitz. Wilder could give as good as he got., of course, and variously called Bogart "evil", "a weasel", "ugly", "a sh1t", etc. The director did, on the other hand, praise Bogart's professionalism, and ended up hailing Bogart as being "what every American would like to be".

    All in all, accounts of the film's making are more entertaining by far than the film itself.
     
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  12. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    Keep them posts a coming.
    Can't add anything yet.
    But enjoying the thread.:righton:
     
  13. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    As I said before, being a huge Bogart fan I cannot resist the Blu-Ray editions. I'm particularly looking forward to To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, if they ever come out. I've spoken to PR people at Warners, and nobody has been able to tell me anything about plans to release those great films on Blu-ray, sadly.

    The always excellent DVDbeaver site has a nice review of the Sabrina Blu-ray:

    http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film4/blu-ray_reviews_61/sabrina_blu-ray.htm

    To my layman's eye it seems a very decent Blu-ray. Not as stellar as some - The Maltese Falcon springs to mind - but definitely offering a huge leap forward from the standard DVD, or my rusty old VHS tape.
     
  14. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    Cool.

    In case somehow neglected to mention it before, I've written a few articles and reviews for online film magazines etc. I harbour an ambition to one day put together a book about Bogart's films. You can read a lot about that here:

    http://www.oomska.co.uk/the-stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of/

    I do briefly mention Sabrina in that piece:

    Peter Bogdanovich likes to tell the story James Stewart related to him, about being approached by a stranger who said how much he liked the way Stewart had delivered a snatch of dialog, in a film made some twenty years previously: “And I thought, that’s the wonderful thing about movies. Because if you’re good, and God helps you, and you’re lucky enough to have a personality that comes across, then what you’re doing is, you’re giving people little… tiny… pieces of time… that they never forget.”

    Bogart’s personality, amplified out through cultural loud-hailer of Hollywood, came across better than most. Leaving aside the more obviously iconic aspects – the fedoras and trenchcoats and ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ stuff – his films are still liberally studded with almost unbearably ineffable ‘little pieces of time’, often showcasing his wide range of unusually beguiling quirks and mannerisms. A handful of examples: the way he leans up against the wall and laughs indulgently along with hatcheck girl Mildred Atkinson in ‘In a Lonely Place’, saying “And what do you call an ‘epic’?”; how he pronounces the word ‘boss’ in “I don’t like people who play games. Tell your boss,” as he sucker-punches Eddie Mars’s henchman in ‘The Big Sleep’; the conflation of violence and hilarity when he slaps the ‘copper’ around the face near the start of ‘High Sierra’, before stalking out of the room with his funny little tilted walk; the mocking self-assessment of his sailing outfit in ‘Sabrina’: “Joe college with a touch of arthritis”; disarming Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s evasions in ‘The Maltese Falcon’ with “Uh, you’re not going to go round the room straightening things and poking the fire again are you?”; or just his battered and bristled face the whole way through ‘The African Queen’.
     
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  15. Remurmur

    Remurmur Music is THE BEST! -FZ

    Location:
    Ohio
    Same here. The Caine Mutiny will be the first one I can chime in on , and I'm thinking (hoping) that it is next....:)
     
  16. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    The Caine Mutiny will be up next. It's another oddity. A much more famous film than Sabrina, of course, and one that contains a very famous Bogart performance. I'll have to go through it once more on Blu Ray before we cover it here though....
     
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  17. Remurmur

    Remurmur Music is THE BEST! -FZ

    Location:
    Ohio

    A good excuse for me to re-watch it yet again as well...:)
     
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  18. Myke

    Myke Trying Not To Spook The Horse

    Happy to say that in 2 short years, this changed completely. Now he goes after Bogie's films all the time ! He even got a kick out of seeing a line he'd grown up with, that the local radio used all the time between records :

     
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  19. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    Yeah, my son (now 7 years old) has gradually accepted that B&W does not equate to 'boring'. He still prefers colour, but he does enjoy a good gangster movie, and I probably let him watch filsm he shouldn't (according to the certificates) see. Anyway he can now list his favourite Bogart films. Probably his all time favorite, so far, is High Sierra.
     
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  20. Myke

    Myke Trying Not To Spook The Horse

    Recently picked up The Best Of Bogart Collection, and The Enforcer, both on Blu ray.

    The 4 Bogie/Bacall films are promised on Blu ray early next year.
     
  21. Rocker

    Rocker Senior Member

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    I don't know why he'd feel that way, considering his real-life marriage to Lauren Bacall... ;)

    In fact, one of the reasons Bogey disapproved of Hepburn was because he wanted Bacall in the role instead.
     
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  22. kevinsinnott

    kevinsinnott Forum Coffeeologist

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    Ah, interesting. I think Bacall was a few years older, but I see your point.
     
  23. Rocker

    Rocker Senior Member

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    Bacall was 5 years older than Hepburn. :)
     
  24. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    Heh. Indeed. Bogart himself was a good bit older than his partner.

    I never heard that, about Bogart wanting Bacall to have the Hepburn role. You sure you're not thinking of the Graham part in 'In A Lonely Place'? Doesn't really fit with what I do know about how Bogart got the role: a meeting was arranged with Wilder, via Bogart's agent who played tennis with Wilder. Wilder was initially dismissive of the agent's suggestion of Bogart for the role, but later - presumably after Cary Grant pulled out - reconsidered. Drinks were arranged (and drunk) at Bogart's house, but they never got round to discussing details: Bogart told Wilder (I'm paraphrasing): "Don't bother telling me anything about the part, Billy, I'll do it. Just promise me that you'll take care of me, and we'll shake hands on it."

    Either way, could Bacall have been any more wrong for the Hepburn role?! What next, Peter Lorre taking the William Holden role?
     
  25. FieldingMellish

    FieldingMellish Active Member Thread Starter

    Really? Any official info available on that? I'll be very interested to see what sort of restoration job they've done on The Big Sleep. I saw it a couple of times in the cinema in recent years - in a supposedly 'new print' - and it seemed to be in a right state. I don't know the technical terms, but there were plentiful scratches etc.
     
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