Humphrey Bogart Movies

The Maltese Falcon remains to be one of the sharpest and most contemptuous deathless classics from Hollywood, bracingly stalwart even by post-Tarantino standards. Humphrey Bogart is Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s private detective who’s having difficulty keeping his cool as he discovers double-crosses left and right. The Maltese Falcon revolves around the stolen statue from the Middle East of the same name. The plot may be too bizarre to follow but it doesn’t even make a difference. Hammett’s dialogue on the other hand is delivered with astonishing speed and burlesque ferocity, as Bogie confronts Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, averts the deceitful advances of Mary Astor, and destroys a cowardly “gunsel” portrayed by Elisha Cook Jr. By implication, it is an action movie of all sorts. All the characters seem to be always on the verge of resorting to violence. Although, Director John Huston and Humphrey Bogart themselves both consider The Maltese Falcon as their turning point movie in accordance to their careers. Huston (The African Queen) made his debut as a director in 1941 through this movie and Bogart, who got the role with luck since George Raft declined the offer, built his influential and style-changing antihero persona.

. –David Chute

High Sierra id a 1941 melodrama that is remembered both for its powerful performances and their implications on the evolution of the past decade’s crime dramas into film noir. Directed by veteran direction Raoul Walsh and handwritten by the famed John Huston, this incident is no accident. W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar), the original writer of the novel in which the film was based also teamed up with the two. Humphrey Bogart’s role as the main character Roy “Mad Dog” Earle, John Dillinger’s invisible friend, He finds an identifying role that assumes the underlying moral uncertainty of meaning and capital fatalism can be seen in the roles soon to follow, including Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon, Huston’s debut as a director.

Among all the other gangster melodramas that feature Bogart as a crazed sociopath, his characterization of Earle in High Sierra comes in a little differently. Upon having been pardoned after a long time in prison, the tired robber is certainly focused on cherishing his freedom than go back to action immediately. Little did he know that his release was engineered and planned by a mobster who has only one goal: Make Earle his own henchman and instruct him to make risky burglary. This paved way to the development of a plot that is a prototype for doomed-heist capers- a viable subgenre that would later consist of Huston’s Asphalt Jungle and The Killing by Stanley Kubrick.

However, High Sierra’s success as a film does not lie in the plot itself but with Earle’s companion who is a brash young man the confederates selected to aid him and the tough-looking yet vulnerable taxi dancer named (Ida Lupino) they are competing for. Joan Leslie was then a starlet and played the role of another young woman complicating Lupino’s attraction to Earle in the film. But the film can be said to have soared into its nail-biting moment when the wound Earle, pursued by authorities, continued to flee higher towards the mountains and his conclusive suicidal performance would later become a cliché of sorts in lesser films, but in High Sierra it gives a compelling finish closed by Lupino’s brilliant final scene.

–Sam Sutherland