Movie Madness Part 1

The Maltese Falcon

I rediscovered Casablanca about five years ago. (Truth be told, I really only discovered it around then. My first attempt was when I was sixteen, where the pretense of ‘watching it’ with my then girlfriend devolved into a sloppy make-out session before Bogey even hit the screen.) So damn good, that movie. Brilliant dialogue, surprisingly topical for its time, and for a classic, incredibly watchable. After watching that, I walked away with the impression that Humphrey Bogart could do no wrong. But then I watched The Maltese Falcon.

Bad, bad, bad, bad. Bad movie! I wanted to punch the cassette after it came out of the VCR. I wish I’d read the book because my anger would be better justified, but even with my limited familiarity with Dashiell Hammett I can still imagine how mortified the guy must have been over this movie. I’m not even going to recap the story other than to say that there is a bejeweled statue of a falcon, and people want it, and you don’t really find any of this out until you’re far past caring about anyone and anything. A litany of the movie’s sins follow:

• The dialogue is entirely exposition. It starts with the most uninteresting information dump I’ve ever seen on film. Have you read The Celestine Prophecy? Same thing. Character One enters, opens mouth, vomits information. Character One leaves. Cue Character Two.
• Bogey takes off his suit jacket way too often. It might not sound like much, but underneath those supercool suits they wore back in the forties, the pants end somewhere close to the nipples and the ties are two inches long.
• There is the occasional bit of action, but it usually involves Bogey’s lightening quick reflexes and singular disarming techniques—and it’s the dumbest shit you’ve have ever seen. One time, he punches a gun out of some guy’s hand. In a different scene, he grabs the same guy’s wrist and makes the dude punch himself. This was about the time that I thought, didn’t Jorge and I makes this movie in his backyard one time?

I could go on, but frankly I can’t be bothered. This movie made me briefly lose faith in Bogart. Where his stoicism and low, musical cadence comes off as cool in Casablanca, in this one he looks bored at best and a bad actor at worse. So thank God it wasn’t very long after before I watched:

To Have and Have Not

Another adaptation, and another case where I’m largely unfamiliar with the source material, but this movie is superior to The Maltese Falcon in every conceivable way. It tells the story of Harry Morgan, a ship-owner who runs chartered fishing trips in wartime Martinique. Morgan becomes involved with a beautiful woman (Lauren Bacall) who wiles away her time picking pockets in hopes to one day return to America. To provide her with the revenue to get home, Morgan accepts a commission from French resistance fighters to smuggle their leader into the country. This trip inevitably leads him afoul of the Vichy police, endangering his life and the lives of those connected to him.

The behind the scenes story goes that director Howard Hawks approached Ernest Hemmingway suggesting he could direct one of the author’s books, and Hemmingway gave him the rights to what he thought of as his worst novel. In the end, the film adaptation (scripted partly by William Faulkner) bares very little resemblance to its source material. The final result was not dissimilar to Casablanca, except this time Bogey gets the girl (in more ways than one; Bogart and Bacall fell in love during the production.)

Unlike Falcon, the dialogue here is snappy—people actually speak lines that you’d want to remember, instead of just barfing information at one another. Also, there’s a sense of danger because you actually give a shit about some of the characters. And the romantic leads have chemistry. Falcon has this stupid, tacked-on, unbelievable love story that rears its ugly head in the last six minutes or so. To Have and Have Not’s love story is convincing, it seems justified, and there’s a strong sexual element to it. “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” I think Casablanca is a better movie, but the chemistry’s hotter in this one.

Night of the Hunter

I found this one staring up at me a few weeks ago when I was returning something at the library. In advance, I only knew that it stared Robert Mitchum as a widow-murdering preacher and that it was, go figure, creepy. It lived up to its reputation. Mitchum’s character follows the kind of religion “that the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us.” He has the words Love and Hate tattooed on his fingers as a tool to teach about the struggle of good and evil. And he murders those widows but good.

I’ve seen a lot of old movies lately, and I’d started to despise the old-movie-musical-score. Not outright, just the melodramatic musical swells used to force a scene into greater heights of drama or humour. To Have and Have Not is guilty of that a little, and this one is really bad at first but seems to get over that crutch as the movie progresses.

Lastly—young Shelley Winters: sorta hot.

Rent

In general, you can accept the concept of someone spontaneously bursting into song, or you can’t. You’re probably hardwired one way or the other. I usually can, but this movie sent me from belief to disbelief and back again at least a half dozen times. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t an especially good movie.

You know the story: we’re young, we’re bohemian, we all have AIDS, and we’re not gonna pay, we’re not gonna pay, we’re not gonna pay last year’s rent. (Fine, there’s more to it than that. I really enjoyed the play, and enjoyed the movie alright, but in the end, I just like to mock.) It begins with the curtain coming up on a stage, with the principal actors standing in a line. They sing "Seasons of Love," the curtain closes, the lights go down. Right then, I thought I’m going to love this movie. Then it moves onto the streets of New York and, shortly afterward, into the most ridiculous production number of the film, with hundreds of rent-defying youth burning eviction notices and tossing them down into the street in a rain of fire. Throughout, this is how the movie teeters, from real and affecting one minute (an AIDS support group singing their mantra, afraid they’ll lose their dignity and that no one will care,) to just silly the next (thirty bohos thrusting out jazz-hands and posing for no one in particular at the end of "La Vie Boheme.")

Chicago worked much better for me than Rent did. I mean, I can’t remember a single lyric from it, and I don’t think I ever want to see it again, but Chicago is far and away a better movie than Rent. Strangely, I would see Rent again. The scenes that worked really worked. And the rest of it...

... will hopefully be less embarrassing the next time I see it.