Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

It's a great film. Probably Bogart' s best performance.

I don't know about that. It's definitely one of the better ones, but it still has to contend with In a Lonely Place and The Caine Mutiny (and for a completely different kind of performance, The African Queen).

'In a Lonely Place' is probably my favorite performance. Yet Bogart is for me first and foremost Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Not as deep and not as well developed as the other characters that have been nominated so far, but he embodies coolness.

My favorite Bogart performances are: High Sierra, In a Lonely Place and The Barefoot Contessa. And since Bogart is the icon of coolness, his coolest role and coolest film is To Have And Have Not...mostly because his interactions between him-and Walter Brennan, him-and-Bacall (who fall in love in front of our eyes).

I think Lonely Place is his best and these days, that's pretty much a consensus. Bogart like Jimmy Stewart is an example of an old-movie actor that just doesn't go away, he still taps into something people can relate to much like Stewart.

But again with Bogart you have a lot to choose from, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca assuredly, Dark Passage (which okay is more Bacall's film and more a great film by Delmer Daves) and even Beat the Devil (where Jennifer Jones and Peter Lorre steal the show).

I can't believe I forgot about In a Lonely Place. But he kind of plays the stock rough guy in that film. It's deconstructed to all hell, but it's there, and he's played it before. Doesn't take away from his fantastic performance, but Sierra is a different turn at least I think so.

edited 16th Nov '16 2:04:00 PM by LongTallShorty64

Yeah. Don't get me wrong, in the hands of any lesser actor, Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny" would have SUCKED as a cliched character - it is definitely one of Bogart's best roles, but Dobbs in "Sierra Madre" is just him being sublime. And everyone either chooses either "The Caine Mutiny" or (other than here, obvs) "The African Queen" as Bogart's stand-out best performances. I tend not to agree.

I've yet to see the The African Queen or the The Caine Mutiny, so maybe my opinion may change.

EDIT: And I was about to say that I thought Caine had Clark Gable instead but that's Mutiny on the Bounty. Too many mutinies!

edited 16th Nov '16 2:27:59 PM by LongTallShorty64

African Queen is amusing but I don't think it's prime Bogart...yes he won and Oscar for it but that's fairly meaningless...

My favorite Bogart role was in The Return of Dr.X. Yes, I'm kidding.

It's hard to believe that Bogart started out in stage roles playing the "juvenile." I think he once described his stage career as mostly wearing white pants and asking people if they wanted to play tennis. It's also weird to think that his film career goes all the way back to 1928.

I liked him in a lot of things. The Petrified Forest is interesting in that he plays the villain (tired, bitter, and with arms permanently cocked at the elbow from wearing shackles), and (for me anyway) that his much later iconic turn in Key Largo has a remarkably similar set up, with him on the other side of the moral compass.

That's the thing about the Hollywood factory. It's not really a factory so much as a laboratory. Some stars are born, others are made...they get tinkered with, tried and tested with different roles to see how it would work, and sometimes the experiments take on lives of their own.

Bogart was one such example. He was under contract, studios didn't know what to make of him...he was not handsome enough to be a romantic male lead, too urban looking and urban sounding to be a Western or historical drama/adventure hero...too interesting looking to be wasted as cheap thugs in B-Movie. So eventually Bogart had to create a new kind of role and type. And he befirended writers like John Huston (who wrote High Sierra and directed Maltese Falcon) to fashion that for him.

I'm probably misremembering some of the details here, but I read once where Bogart spoke to Jack Warner, sometime in the late 30's, saying that he'd prefer to get the kinds of parts that George Raft was getting. Warner told him that Raft wanted James Cagney's parts, Cagney wanted Edward G. Robinson's parts, and Robinson wanted Paul Muni's parts. Bogart came back with "So you're telling me I need to kill Paul Muni?"

Yep that was the Bogart personality right there.

Actually in the 30s, as a character actor Bogart did play some weird roles. Check out Tay Garnett's Stand-In, an odd Hollywood Satire where Bogart has a supporting role as a dandy film-maker. It would be the first of two times he played movie directors, second time is in The Barefoot Contessa.

So there was a sense that nobody knew what the hell to do with him.

I remember seeing him as the warden (the humane, understanding warden, taking over from a brutal martinet) of a boys reformatory in a Bowery Boys movie. I thought that was a seriously odd role for him.

edited 17th Nov '16 4:37:34 PM by Robbery

Anybody seen the noir, On Dangerous Ground?

It's one of those little gems that's been newly discovered.

edited 25th Nov '16 3:00:13 PM by LongTallShorty64

Nicholas Ray fans have long loved On Dangerous Ground. It has the great Robert Ryan.

IT's incredibly ahead of its time. The opening section doesn't have a plot at all. Just a series of vignettes about police drama and then you have stuff like night-photography and handheld cameras and very modern fight scenes and also a brutality to urban violence, the suggestion of rape. It's a much harsher look at crime than most Film Noir. Very realistic too.

It's a pity Howard Hughes wrecked the film's structure. I fixed the edit on your Trivia page with what happened. The ending wasn't any problem for Ray, it was the structure of the film that bothered him.

Hey, thanks for that edit job. The "Czar of noir" guy gave an intro the film with that explanation to why the ending is a little rushed.

Yeah, the film was fantastic. I really did like the opening vignette scenes. There's a great panning shot (I believe it is) that is great to see. It gives it a sort of freedom of movement compared to more static films and it adds to the realism for me.

Eddie Muller? Yeah that guy is not a good researcher.

He doesn't go into archives, look at script drafts...which is the stuff real film historians like Bernard Eisenschitz do that. They are more promoters and programmers and they tend to repeat old anecdotes.

Nicholas Ray was quite an experimental film-maker in 50s Hollywood. He did similar stuff in his last RKO Studios movie...The Lusty Men which title aside, is a really amazing movie starring Robert Mitchum as a Rodeo performer. It's quite bleak and sad, and it has that similar style (handheld cameras attached to the actors as they ride horses and bulls) and so on.

edited 25th Nov '16 7:24:00 PM by JulianLapostat

On the topic of Hughes, he was such a weirdo. And I don't understand how he's so popular either. There's a movie coming out where he's not the main character, but he's in the period piece/love story as some sort of voice of reason (I'm going on my guesses from what seems to be in the trailer). Then there's the Scorsese film. Sure, he was interesting but a whole movie for this guy? I just don't understand; why him?

Howard Hughes is just an inherently fascinating character...which is not to say he's a good person. I think he's fascinating for how plainly neurotic he is. He's the kind of person who could only be American, the incredible wealth, the total naive brutality, the yearning desire to be likes, the man-childishness, the preening showmanship...the combination of all into one package. Orson Welles originally modeled the early drafts of Kane on Hughes but then settled on making him a press-baron.

As a producer, Hughes subjected RKO Studios to a "systematic seven-year rape" and wrecked the studios into a mere shadow of what it once was. He produced this film Vendetta where he hired and fired several directors: Preston Sturges, Max Ophuls and others. Ophuls was so appalled by how Hughes treated him that he made Caught with Robert Ryan as a psycho-millionaire named Smith Ohlrig, who is Hughes.

I guess it's easy to make an interesting story/film based on a real person when said person was extremely eccentric and has many anecdotes. I just dislike him so much that I find his antics more grating than interesting.

Well, the films about Hughes are not really complementary. Caught by Ophuls is a scathing Take That!. Even Howard Hawks couldn't stand him. He only put up with him because he needed Hughes to help him make Scarface but considered him to be a major tool.

Nicholas Ray had a love-hate relationship. He hated Hughes for what he did to On Dangerous Ground but he also respected Hughes for protecting him from The Hollywood Blacklist despite the fact that Hughes knew that he was a card-carrying member of CPUSA. All Ray had to do was do a private testimony to the FBI where he snitched on his ex-wife and that was it...no public testimony or humiliation before the Committee and nobody knew what he did until Eisenschitz wrote that book. Ray kind of helped Hughes by overseeing many of the tacky RKO stuff and Hughes seemed to have liked him on a personal level.

Hughes was more or less the Donald Trump of his time, albeit with a little more personal courage. He was a pilot and a daredevil and he did risk his life by piloting his own designs,..but that guy wasn't a terribly good businessman or movie producer, but somehow had a way of making everything about him. He also became seriously mentally ill. Hughes was so notorious that he offended the famously tyrannical Harry Cohn of Columbia...he would schedule meetings at 03:00 in the night in some gas station miles outside the city...why, For the Lulz.

That Cohn story is hilarious. That's the only plus I can give Hughes, pissing of Harry Cohn.

There's a huge "ick" factor with Hughes that I can't really describe; I just don't like the guy. To each their own.

I always get Howard Hughes and Nikola Tesla confused. Which one held onto all their fingernail clippings?

Hughes, I think.

Hughes was fully insane...he didn't cut his fingernails, it grew way past his fingers, would collect jars of his urine...and so on.

He was also a major sexual predator so that explains the "ick" factor. Ophuls Caught shows how totally evil he was. It's also a major aversion of Good Girls Avoid Abortion and that too in a 1948 Film Noir

Tesla was just a Mad Scientist...