Bogart
Monday, January 02, 2006
Humphrey Bogart
Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade is a prototype for ideal modern manhood--someone who can take any twist in the plot, any brutal first-hand experience, and put it in the context of his job. He remains glib and cheerfully horny throughout, calm at the center of a baroquely plotted storm. To an inhuman and hostile environment he presents something equally inhuman--impassive professionalism, a light attitude. This is part of what makes Hammett's books (and especially his short stories) so funny. He expects us to recognize that this character could only be fictional, less a real detective than an archetype. Sam Spade is to the art of detection as Jeeves is to the art of butlering.
By the time Raymond Chandler updated the formula a decade later, on the eve of war and mobilization on an apocalyptic scale, those assumptions could no longer be made. His invention, Phillip Marlowe, moves in the same circles as Sam Spade and takes the same kind of cases. He uses the same language and holds the same tenacious attitude to his work. He wisecracks and beds the femmes fatales who pass before his eyes. The difference is that Marlowe gets tired out. The whole parade affects him. This insanity, the bodycount, the teenaged thugs in big-boy suits--this is a life, anybody's life who has a superior officer or a boss or a rich client. Sam Spade is a heroic character: Philip Marlowe is tragic. This may be a more subtle version of the very old question of Dionysean versus Appollonian tendencies in art--the raw versus the cooked--restated as the archetypical, comically square-jawed Spadeian type versus the ironic-archetypical, somewhat neurotic, fatalistic but somehow-still-standing-in-the-end Marlowian type.
Humphrey Bogart had the distinction of playing both Marlowe and Spade, and for defining the look and bearing of both characters in the public's mind. He was good in both roles, but his limited understanding of how these characters worked is underscored by the fact that he played Sam Spade as Philip Marlowe and, three years later, he played Philip Marlowe as Sam Spade. In The Maltese Falcon, Bogart played Sam Spade on a painful knife edge--it's almost uncomfortable to see him take the impassive Mary Astor by the shoulders and spit through emotionally gritted teeth: "I love you but I won't play the sap for you," or to witness him knocking over settees and wailing about "the truth" in the middle of an overcivilised negotiation with the unctuously cool Sidney Greenstreet. Bogart has his back against the wall in The Maltese Falcon in a way Sam Spade never did in the book. You could see his consciousness clicking in this film.
But then, Bogart may have been thinking about his career. At middle age, he had finally broken out of the B-picture underworld, playing endless variations on Tough #2 for over a decade, and could finally lay claim to to the lead in a couple of pictures: High Sierra and this picture, in which he had been elevated to the status of Tough #1. I guess he probably thought of these pictures the way a gambler thinks of a good night at the table. He finally got his shot, and though he couldn't expect too much the next time he sat down at least he got one good payoff. And sure enough, his next role was in a B picture, though that B picture turned out to be Casablanca.
I like Casablanca in spite of its corny stylization. The film is supported by a girding of memorable quotes and one liners and overbroad characters piled up like a glass shelf full of kitten tzochkes. But it works. It never topples over. Every time a memorable line gets overworked another one falls hard-to and props it up. The effect is like an Oulipian mathematico-literary experiment. The flashback courtship between Bogart and Bergman, for instance, plays like a game of ping pong: "Where are you going? Where have you been?"... "Please, we said no questions"... "Here's looking at you kid." One almost expects it to continue: "On top of the world, Ma!"..."Tomorrow is another day"..."Rosebud," etc., like a classics reel at the Academy awards.
What I think really holds the film together is Bogart. His portrayal of Rick Blaine posits a film archetype that didn't come up very often before: the self pitying strongman. Imagine a millionaire weeping on his yacht, bitching that the maid won't sleep with him. This is Rick's moral equivalent, yet he's perhaps one of the more sympathetic characters in movie history. Why is this? Rick gets drunk in his own bar--where in the daytime he acts as absolute master--and commands Sam to play bittersweet tunes to him, as the boss indulges in bottomed-out melodramatic despair. His fatalism borders nearly on parody. "Of all the gin joints in all the cities in all the world," he says, "why did she have to step into mine?" It's an unusually self-indulgent performance, and Bogart risks turning the scene into comedy. Instead he taps into some strange thing in his audience: the desire to have enough capital (one's own piano player, an entire bar full of liquor) to pity oneself properly. We shouldn't underestimate this luxury. At the age of 43 we will all begin to feel ourselves disintegrate. We will no longer be quite as attractive to the opposite sex, our faces will begin to fold inward and our backs will begin to ache. Yet only a lucky few will be able to wallow in it. Bogart enacts this for us: it's a brave performance in that he risks the enmity of our better, un-self-pitying side. That he got away with it opened to door to untold male self-pity. Tony Soprano, murderous tyrant, millionaire, in need of constant female therapy, wouldn't exist today if it weren't for Rick Blaine.
So Bogart got away with something in that performance, and turned a B picture into a monument of modern male consciousness. This (and the terrifically glib proclivities of his next director, Howard Hawks) may explain his portrayal of Philip Marlowe two years later in The Big Sleep. He coasts in this film. Bogart's Marlowe has women--bookstore clerks, taxi girls, heiresses both evil and not--falling at his feet, and men he has crawling for cover, and that's all he does. He may as well be a Humphrey Bogart movie poster on a stick. A deep performance it is not, yet he's palpably enjoying himself in the way that only works in a Howard Hawks picture. He has so much fun in his role you can practically hear him turn to the audience witha leer and say: "check out the gams on this dame, huh, fellas?" It's something Sam Spade would do.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:24 AM,
