Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 67: A Couple More Bogeys

Okay so I know I've been chastising everyone for not watching some of the classics over the last few days but I'm no saint myself when it comes to missing out on the oldies. In fact I've seen less the ten film from this decade's list including the next two films. Also in the last post we looked at Casablanca, but leading man Humphrey Bogart was a busy boy in the 1940s. After a lot of supporting roles in the 1930s he finally became a big star and was probably the top leading man in that decade. Although he didn't win his Best Actor Oscar, for The African Queen, until the 1950s the 1940s were definitely Bogey's best decade. And recently I watched two of his films from the decade one pre and one post Casablanca and both directed by John Huston.

First up we have The Maltese Falcon, Huston's first film as a director, and a nominee at the 1942 ceremony. In it Bogart plays private detective Sam Spade whose detective partner is shot while on a job tracking a man for a girl whose sister has supposedly run off with him. The man also dies that night and Spade is fingered for both murders and has to find out who killed who. Spade then gets charged with the task of finding a black figure of a bird which turns out to be the titular Maltese Falcon, a jewel encrusted figure which was a gift to King Charles V of Spain from the Knights of Malta. During his investigation Bogart meets the diminutive and excitable Joel Cairo and the large and domineering Kasper Gutman sometimes referred to as the fat man. Cairo is the man who first asks Spade to look for the bird and Gutman is able to explain its significance. Meanwhile Spade finds out that the girl Brigid was also after the bird with the man who was killed. The film then builds to a climax as we try to discover who shot who and who is scamming who and what will Spade do? Bogart's Spade isn't a million miles away from Casablanca's Rick, both characters don't really have an emotional attachment to the item on offer and both would rather no attract trouble. Unlike Rick, Spade is basically after money, although there is a brief spark between him and Brigid its nothing like the Rick and Ilsa romance in Casablanca. The similarities to Casablanca don't end there though as Bogart's co-stars are Peter Lorre (as Cairo) and Sydney Greenstreet (as Gutman), the former played the petit criminal in Casablanca while the latter played the rival bar owner. Greenstreet in fact was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and rightly so as, apart from Bogart, his performance is the film's best, the excellent adapted screenplay was also nominated. What I will say is that this is the first proper mystery film that I've watched since I've been doing this quest. While The Thin Man did have a kind of murder mystery structure, The Maltese Falcon was incredibly involving and very well plotted, I believe that Bogart's performance here at least deserved an Oscar nom but this was the year that How Green Was My Valley walked off with most of the awards and there was hardly anything left for even Citizen Kane.

Bogart returned to Oscar-nominated films at the last ceremony of the decade with The Treasure of The Sierra Madre which did however win Best Director and Adapted Screenplay for John Huston and Best Supporting Actor for his father Walter. The film sees Bogart's Dobbs teaming up with Huston's Howard and Tim Holt's Curtin to find gold in the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico. Dobbs and Curtin meet as two Americans down on their luck in Mexico and soon decide to seek Gold with the help of old-timer Howard. They soon strike it lucky but there are complications which include the arrival of bandits, a fourth American discovering them and Dobbs' own paranoia and greed. It is the final one of those three that the film ultimately plays on as Dobbs believes that Howard is out to get him and that Curtin plans to short change him later on. In terms of plot that's about it and that's the beauty of the film as it is a study of the human psyche and how much trust we can give our fellow man. This theme is played upon nicely both by the haunting score and by the brilliantly shot close-ups of all three men. The central three performances are all excellent, Bogart really did deserve a Best Actor nomination here as his portrayal of the greedy Gringo Dobbs is an intense and sometimes unlikeable one. Dobbs is definitely different from Bogart's other two roles in this decade and that's even better as we don't really expect a man who's played so many heroes to here play a morally ambiguous character. Walter Huston also does well as the old-timer who's obviously seen men affected by gold in a similar way before, Huston impressed me with his work in Dodsworth so it's nice to see him winning an award while Tim Holt also does well as the upstanding Curtin. The film isn't perfect, it takes a little too long to get started and some of Howard's scenes in the Mexican village should've been quicker but overall this is a masterpiece that shows you don't need a huge story to keep audiences entranced for two hours.

There will be a little bit more bogey before the decade is out but these are definitely two of his defining films and I'm glad that I got to watch both of them for the first time.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 66: You Must Remember This

At the 1944 Oscar ceremony, ten films were nominated for Best Picture, this was the last time this would happen until 2010. The film that triumphed that year was obviously one that is still hailed as a classic that is Casablanca. Those who haven't seen Casablanca, and I will stop chastising people for not seeing these films, will still know lines from it 'here's looking at you kid', 'of all the gin joints in all the world she had to walk into mine' and 'Louis, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship'. There's also the 'Play it Again Sam' quandary as that line doesn't appear in the film when Bogart tells piano player Sam to play 'As Time Goes By', the song which also is something that people would associate with the film. The basic plot concerns people stuck in Casablanca trying to travel from Nazi occupied Europe to the neutral Lisbon and then on to America. Our central figure is Humphrey Bogart's Rick who is seemingly uninvolved in all the struggles that are going on around him and instead is happy to take people's money whether they be Nazi officers or those trying to escape. The item that keeps the plot moving are letters of transit, documents which let whoever holds them travel freely around Europe, which end up in Rick's possession after they are handed him by a petit thief who is arrested by the Nazi Officers. Rick's former love Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, comes into his bar and back into his life after the two had a fleeting romance in France years earlier. Ilsa along with her husband Victor are another couple trying to leave Casablanca and is after letters of transit himself. From there the film is both a love triangle and a thriller revolving around the transit papers will Rick give them willingly to Ilsa and will they be discovered in his possession by Claude Rains' corrupt cop Louis. Again I'm not going to ruin it for you either you've seen it already or you really need to watch it.

One thing I do really love about Casablanca is the characterisation. None of the main leads are either truly good or bad, even the despicable Louis has a moment of redemption in the film's final scenes. Rick's motivations are unclear for most of the film, and he certainly isn't a hero preferring to be a passive figure during this war. While Ilsa isn't just a wallflower and seems to more in control then husband Victor in terms of their quest for the papers. I also have to applaud the art direction in particular Rick's cafe, in which the majority of the film is set, comes to life through the hustle and bustle of the various patrons and the gambling rooms in the back. Of the performances themselves Bogart is amazing in the lead while Bergman manages to hold her own. Also I do love Claude Rains as Louis, he is incredibly slimy but also humorous and straight-laced when he needs to be. Rains and Bogart were both nominated for acting awards but neither were successful while Bergman wasn't even nominated for her role here, although she did get a nomination this year for her role in Whom The Bell Tolls. As well as Best Picture, the Adapted Screenplay and Michael Curtiz's direction also won, but I think Casablanca should've swept the board. But again this is a classic which more than deserves its place as one of the 82 films that have won Best Picture.