Classic Films in Focus: DARK PASSAGE (1947)

Delmer Daves' Dark Passage (1947) is the third picture to pair Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who had become Mr. and Mrs. Bogart in 1945, after their steamy introduction to one another and the world in To Have and Have Not (1944). Dark Passage is not as celebrated as that first film or The Big Sleep (1946), but it represents another opportunity to see the couple heat up the screen with their legendary chemistry. In spite of its emphasis on the romance between its two leads, the movie takes a deeply cynical view of the justice system and provides enough murder and mystery to satisfy film noir fans.

Bogart stars as Vincent Parry, who escapes from San Quentin after being wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his wife. He gets unexpected help from Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall), a sympathetic and very attractive young woman. Irene hides Vincent in her car and then her apartment as the cops search for him all over San Francisco. With a new face molded by an eccentric plastic surgeon (Houseley Stevenson), Vincent sets out to learn who framed him for the killing of his wife and his friend, George (Rory Mallinson), who turns up dead just after Vincent makes his escape. His efforts are complicated by Madge (Agnes Moorehead), a former acquaintance who testified against him in court, and by a cheap crook (Clifton Young) who hopes to blackmail Vincent and Irene.

The movie opens with the unusual and not entirely successful gimmick of making the camera show Vincent's perspective rather than Vincent himself, a trick also used the same year in Lady in the Lake (1947). It takes more than a third of the movie for us to get our first real glimpse of Bogart. The justification is that it takes that long for Vincent to look like Bogart, since he has to have the plastic surgery to hide his identity from the cops, but it still seems like a long time to run with this approach. It also delays the signature banter and sexual sparks that fly between Bogart and Bacall, which is why most people watch the movie in the first place. Once we finally have the leading man in the camera's view, the movie picks up, and the two stars get their much anticipated scenes together.

When Bogart and Bacall aren't busy with their romance, Dark Passage turns its attention to darker themes, namely the total absence of justice in a system that treats innocent men as killers and lets guilty people get away. The rotten characters, played with malevolent energy by Agnes Moorehead and Clifton Young, use that broken system for their own benefit, and only poetic justice ever catches up with them. Sympathetic characters immediately side with Vincent, even if they don't know anything about him. Irene knows from personal experience that the law is good at going after the wrong guy; her own father died in prison under similar circumstances, and she has followed Vincent's case from the beginning. Vincent also gets understanding assistance from a cab driver (Tom D'Andrea) who arranges the appointment with the plastic surgeon and doesn't even expect anything in return. Vincent quickly realizes that it's up to him to figure out who really murdered his wife and his friend, since the cops are only interested in catching him, but even when he gets the answer he can't fix a system that never looks beyond the easiest, most obvious suspect.

For the fourth and final pairing of Bogart and Bacall, see Key Largo (1948). Bogart, a noir icon, plays more hard-boiled characters in High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and In a Lonely Place (1950). Catch Bacall's solo appearances in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), The Shootist (1976), and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). For more from Delmer Daves, try Destination Tokyo (1943), Broken Arrow (1950), and 3:10 to Yuma (1957). Don't miss Agnes Moorehead in Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and Jane Eyre (1943); the actress had a long and successful career before she stepped into her most famous role on the television series, Bewitched.

Classic Films in Focus: THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

Humphrey Bogart successfully steps into the gumshoes of detective Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks' adaptation of The Big Sleep (1946), but in 1945 the top brass at Warner Brothers were far more concerned about Lauren Bacall, as the extensive revisions that preceded the film's release prove. It's not that the original 1945 cut of the picture and the final version are all that different; it's just that the tinkering labors to put Bacall in the best possible light, both literally and figuratively. The studio's effort paid off; Bacall, by then Mrs. Humphrey Bogart, got her career back on track after bad reviews in Confidential Agent (1945), and noir fans got a picture for the ages, with the perfectly paired leads trading zippy quips and stepping around corpses as coolly as they pour themselves drinks. As obvious as The Big Sleep is when it comes to top noir picks, the movie deserves its elevated spot in the genre pantheon, not only because of Bogart and Bacall but because of writers like Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, and Leigh Brackett, as well as a seriously deranged Martha Vickers as one of the worst kid sisters in cinematic history.

The story opens when Bogart's Marlowe is hired by the elderly General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to shake off a blackmailer targeting his wild younger daughter, Carmen (Martha Vickers). Marlowe immediately suspects that some other funny business is afoot when the older daughter, Vivian Rutledge (Bacall), pumps him for information but acts coy about her own interest in the blackmailer job, and she clearly knows a lot more than she's willing to say. Marlowe soon finds himself and Carmen tangled up in a murder scene, and more corpses follow, but the mystery keeps coming back to a missing man named Regan and casino owner Eddie Mars (John Ridgely).

The revisions play up the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall by giving them more lines and scenes together, although some of the changes are purely cosmetic in terms of making Bacall look as alluring as possible. More of the pair is certainly a plus, even if the cuts obscure important elements of the murder mystery plot. Bogart and Bacall fit with noir - and with each other - the way a bullet fits into the chamber of a gun. His Marlowe is smart and unsentimental, a guy who has been around the block enough to know when he's being had. Her Vivian is no debutante, either, with her gambling debts and her husky, come-on voice. Nobody ever declared her affection with such sullen resignation as Bacall's Vivian when she tells Marlowe, "I guess I'm in love with you." Marlowe falls for her even as he realizes that he can't trust her, but he correctly guesses that she's no femme fatale. If they never reach quite the level of smart-mouthed irresistible attraction that they share in To Have and Have Not (1944), they do smolder very enjoyably, especially during their conversational cat-and-mouse games.

It takes tremendous screen presence to distract our attention from such a couple, but the supporting cast is full of actors who give it their best shot. Martha Vickers plays Carmen as a crazy Lolita, so hopped up on drugs and booze she can't even walk, but dangerous nonetheless. An infantile femme fatale with her thumb in her mouth, Carmen puts the moves on every man she meets, including Marlowe. "You're cute," she tells him, but the way she says it makes the listener's blood run cold. Charles Waldron has one really wonderful scene up front that makes us wish we could see more of his character; his General Sternwood has no pity for himself and only wants a real man to sit with him a while and drink his liquor for him. Even the bit players go for broke; Elisha Cook, Jr. makes the most of his brief appearance as Harry Jones, and Sonia Darrin provides a marvelously nasty foil to Bacall as the heartless, calculating Agnes. Dorothy Malone is so good as the book shop girl that we wonder how Marlowe can resist, especially after she takes off her glasses, but Marlowe's wartime Los Angeles seems to be full of self-possessed, available girls, from Vivian Rutledge all the way down to the eager cab driver who trades innuendos with the amused detective. It's as if Raymond Chandler and Howard Hawks both long to raid a jar stuffed with tough cookies, with Marlowe as the unlikely embodiment of their shared masculine fantasy. At least it gives the young actresses plenty of material, and each of them contributes to the overall appeal of the film.

For more screen versions of Raymond Chandler's detective, see Murder, My Sweet (1944), Lady in the Lake (1947), and The Long Goodbye (1973). Bogart and Bacall went on to star together in Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948), while Howard Hawks moved into Western territory with Red River (1948). Martha Vickers, sadly, did not become a great star, although she did become Mickey Rooney's third wife from 1949 to 1951. You can see more of her in The Man I Love (1947), Ruthless (1948), and Alimony (1949). Dorothy Malone, on the other hand, ended up winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Written on the Wind (1956), and she later appeared in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), Warlock (1959), and even Basic Instinct (1992).


  

A Tribute to Lauren Bacall

I'm not tough. In fact, I'm really kind of a powder puff, the type of person who apologizes at the drop of a hat and can be made to feel bad for months with just a sharp word or a reproving look. Maybe that's why I have always loved the tough dames of classic Hollywood; they exude strength and a "Hell if I care" attitude that I can only dream of having. Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and Lauren Bacall could all cut a man dead with one hard look. Today we lost Bacall, the last of the great noir dames, and the world seems a sadder place without her.

What can you say about an actress who was known as "The Look"? Whatever IT was, she had it in spades. From her very first picture, To Have and Have Not (1944), she was great, feeding Bogart seductive lines and that comeback stare. No wonder he fell hard. Every man on earth must have learned to whistle in 1944, even if he wasn't named Steve (which, by the way, Bogart's character wasn't). Bacall was launched into noir legend and the arms of Humphrey Bogart at the tender age of 19, but you would never have guessed how young she was from the way she carried herself on screen.

She went on acting for the rest of her life. She did voice work, earned an Oscar nomination, went forward, and aged well. She survived the loss of Bogart in 1957, remarried, divorced, raised three children, and wrote multiple memoirs of her life in Hollywood. She was tough, yes, but elegant, too, and into her 80s she was more beautiful than most people can ever hope to be.

Tonight the classic movie fan community - and the world at large - join her family in mourning the loss of Lauren Bacall, but I'm so grateful that she was with us for such a long time, to show us not only how to be tough and 20, but how to be great at every age.

Thanks for everything, Betty Joan Perske. We'll never forget you.

Classic Films in Focus: TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944)

Lauren Bacall got her introduction to Humphrey Bogart and the world with Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944), which only vaguely resembles the novel by Ernest Hemingway but really exists as its own gloriously weird melange of Casablanca (1942), comedy, and film noir cool. Bogart and Bacall burn up the screen as jaded expatriates who fall for each other in the dangerous heat of Vichy Martinique, and their chemistry is as palpable to viewers today as it was to the wartime audiences who first watched Bacall teach Bogart how to whistle. Sexy and smart, even if it isn’t all that interested in its plot, To Have and Have Not sells its strange brew with knowing repartee, an exotic location, and Walter Brennan’s lovably daft obsession with the bite of a dead bee.

Bogart plays American fishing boat captain Harry Morgan, who has brought his boat and his alcoholic partner, Eddie (Walter Brennan), down from Key Largo to Nazi-occupied Martinique. There they eke out a living taking tourists out to fish while avoiding the local politics, even though their friend, Frenchy (Marcel Dalio), begs Harry to transport some resistance leaders wanted by the Vichy officials. When a beautiful but broke pickpocket named Marie (Lauren Bacall) arrives on the island and needs his help, Harry changes his mind about working for the resistance.

From the start there’s a lot of Casablanca being revisited here, from Bogart’s standoffish expatriate to the freedom fighters he inevitably decides to help. Instead of Dooley Wilson as Sam we get Hoagy Carmichael as Cricket, while Claude Rains’ morally ambivalent Captain Renault gets merged with Peter Lorre’s oily Ugarte in Dan Seymour’s creepy Captain Renard. The big difference is Lauren Bacall in place of Ingrid Bergman, but Bacall’s not too good girl changes the whole temperature of the picture; here is an angel already tarnished enough that Bogart doesn’t have to give her up to prove he’s an honorable guy. The resistance fighter’s wife, played by Dolores Moran, never gets the chance to choose Bogart over her heroic spouse because a jealous Marie is already on the scene, and Marie pointedly thwarts Madame de Bursac’s constant attempts to flirt with Harry.

In addition to the chemistry between the two fascinating leads, the picture gets its appeal from its crackling dialogue, in which Lauren Bacall generally has the last word. Marie always calls Harry “Steve,” while he calls her “Slim.” After they kiss for the first time, she tells him, “It’s even better when you help.” Later she says, “I’m hard to get, Steve, All you have to do is ask me.” It’s hard to believe that Bacall was only nineteen when she threw these lines at Bogart with her knowing look and been-there casual despair. Her world-weary youth makes a sharp contrast to Walter Brennan’s aging innocence as the perpetually thirsty Eddie. “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” he asks everyone he meets, but only Bacall’s Marie has the perfect comeback to win him over.

To Have and Have Not launched Bogart and Bacall’s storied romance but also a series of costarring roles. See more of their onscreen heat in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948). Howard Hawks directed a slew of classic favorites, including Bringing Up Baby (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), and Rio Bravo (1959), but he earned his only career Oscar nomination for Best Director with Sergeant York (1941). See more of Walter Brennan in My Darling Clementine (1946), Red River (1948), and Rio Bravo. Bogart is unforgettable in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca, and The African Queen (1951), but Bacall also has great solo roles in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), The Shootist (1976), and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).

Classic Films in Focus: KEY LARGO (1948)

One expects certain things from Bogart and Bacall: screen melting chemistry, sassy lines, the heady mix of cigarettes and sex appeal. We get these things in spades in pictures like To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), but Key Largo (1948) lacks that scintillating sizzle between its two stars, making the picture something of a disappointment for devoted fans of classic Hollywood's most iconic couple. Still, Key Largo has its charms, particularly for those who appreciate Edward G. Robinson, and the film makes an interesting counterpoint to The Petrified Forest (1936), which had made Humphrey Bogart a star.

When Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) arrives in Key Largo, there's a storm brewing both within and without the hotel he has come to visit. McCloud wants to fulfill a wartime obligation to a dead comrade, but in searching out the soldier's father (Lionel Barrymore) and widow (Lauren Bacall) he finds them facing more trouble than mere grief. It turns out that a group of gangsters has taken up residence in the hotel; their leader is the notorious Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), a former big man who plans to be big again, even if he has to leave Key Largo littered with bodies to do it. The arrival of a hurricane only makes matters worse, with the tension building as the gangsters and their hostages ride out the storm.

Bogart and Bacall are both restrained in this film; they don't deliver the tart one-liners and smoldering glances that mark their performances in their other pairings. Partly this is due to their characters: Bogart's McCloud is a man with too much honor to make eyes at his dead friend's wife, and Bacall is too good a wife to forget her fallen hero so easily. A steamy love affair would be unpatriotic at best, given the two characters' situations. As a result, their relationship on the screen plays out more like a cordial friendship than a romance. Director John Huston must have felt that the story required this approach, but still it leaves the viewer somewhat unsatisfied, given the mythic power of the stars' celebrated onscreen chemistry.

The heat and the excitement come from the other couple in Key Largo, Johnny Rocco and his faded flame, Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor). They make a nasty, pathetic pair; Rocco is clearly a sadist, and Gaye is just desperate enough to put up with everything that Rocco dishes out. In one particularly memorable scene, Rocco forces the alcoholic Gaye to sing for a drink and then denies her the coveted reward when he finds her performance lacking. Claire Trevor won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role, and she really is the most interesting person in the entire movie, a fuller, more complicated character than either of the more upright protagonists or the utterly loathsome Rocco. The moral ambiguity that defines her character from the beginning of the film evolves into something much more certain by the climax, but she's the only really dynamic character that Key Largo has to offer, and that gives her the viewer's sympathy and attention in a way that neither Bogart nor Bacall can command.

You might appreciate Key Largo more if you start by watching The Petrified Forest, the 1936 picture that proved to be Bogart's breakout role. In the earlier film, Bogart plays the gangster to Leslie Howard's world weary wanderer, while Key Largo has Bogart now in the Howard role to Robinson's thug. There's a kind of full circle vibe at work between the two pictures, with a number of other parallels - like the enclosed spaces in which they occur - helping to put them in dialogue with one another in some interesting ways. In Maxwell Anderson's original stage version of Key Largo, the McCloud character died, but Huston's version bears very little resemblance to the unsuccessful play. Still, there's a sense of fate that hangs over the screen version of McCloud, and one could easily imagine a different ending to the film. Seeing the climax of The Petrified Forest helps to sharpen the viewer's understanding of how Key Largo might have played out instead.

Edward G. Robinson makes a great bad guy, a role he played often during his long career. Johnny Rocco is one of his better performances in the gangster vein; watch the way he whispers lasciviously into Lauren Bacall's ear. If you enjoy Robinson's work, be sure to catch Little Caesar (1931), Double Indemnity (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945). Claire Trevor earned additional Best Supporting Actress nominations for Dead End (1937) and The High and the Mighty (1954), but she also has memorable roles in Stagecoach (1939) and Murder, My Sweet (1944). Try Dark Passage (1947) for more of Bogart and Bacall, or see Bogart by himself in Dead Reckoning (1947) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). John Huston also directed several of Bogart's biggest films, but for contrast try The Asphalt Jungle (1950) or Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957).

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.

Classic Films in Focus: THE SHOOTIST (1976)

Don Siegel’s Western, The Shootist (1976), is best known today as John Wayne’s last film, the swan song of the genre’s most iconic star. Given its subject matter, no picture could be more appropriate for an actor’s final bow, but The Shootist also serves as an elegy for the West as a whole. It is a movie for adults only, not just because of the swearing and the blood, but because only people who are old enough to understand the quest for dignity in death can appreciate its themes. Helped by a moving performance from Lauren Bacall and supporting appearances from Ron Howard and James Stewart, The Shootist tells a compelling story about the end of one man’s life and the passing of the era that defined him.

Wayne is J.B. Books, a notorious gunman who comes to town looking for confirmation of his terminal illness from an old friend, Dr. Hostetler (Stewart). When the doctor gives him the bad news, Books takes up residence in a local boarding house run by a widow (Bacall) and her son (Howard). Books hopes to protect both his dignity and his privacy in his last days, but his reputation makes him an outcast, a celebrity, and a target, while his illness forces him to consider the kind of death he must choose to face.

Wayne, who was 68 when he made the film, gives one of his most affecting performances as the dying gunslinger. He brings a mixture of strength, humor, and sadness to the character that encourages us to sympathize with Books but not to pity him. He has made his choices and accepts them. When he rides into town at the opening we understand already that his time has passed; the cowboy looks conspicuously out of place in this new world, where streetcars rattle along and new-fangled automobiles are replacing the horse and buggy. It is too late for Books to settle down and join the new order; his subdued romance with the widow, Bond, is merely a taste of what might have been.

As a whole, the picture reflects the changing times of the Western. Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah had already remade the genre into a grittier, more violent vehicle for post-modern themes, leaving the traditional visions of John Ford and Anthony Mann behind. Siegel’s picture, shot in Technicolor, resorts to splashes of garish red blood, which seem both patently fake and unnervingly obscene. The saltier language also indicates an attempt to change with the times, but the presence of the Duke himself roots the picture in the old ways, as the opening montage of previous Wayne roles reveals. Westerns would never really be the same again, and 1976 would also be the year of Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill, and Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks.

Don’t miss Harry Morgan, John Carradine, and Scatman Crothers in supporting roles. Don Siegel is also remembered as the director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Dirty Harry (1971). For more of Wayne’s late Westerns, see True Grit (1969), Big Jake (1971), and Rooster Cogburn (1975). Wayne and Stewart can also be found together in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Ron Howard would try his own hand at directing a Western with the 2003 film, The Missing.

Note: A shorter version of this review can be found on Examiner.com.