The Desperate Hours (1955)

The Desperate Hours was one of Humphrey Bogart’s last films and his performance is an intriguing throwback to The Petrified Forest which had given his first major break back in 1936. The movie itself is caught uneasily between two different eras of film-making but it succeeds because it has the right cast and a great director in William Wyler.

Bogart is one of three criminals on the run after a prison beak-out. They need to find somewhere to hide out and Bogart picks the Hilliard house because there’s a child’s bicycle on the front lawn. People with kids are easier to threaten because they have more to lose and are less likely to take risks like going to the cops.

Glenn Griffin (Bogart), his kid brother Hal (Dewey Martin) and a psychopathic halfwit named Sam Kobish (Robert Middleton) are the three criminals who take the Hilliard family hostage. Daniel Hilliard (Fredric March), his wife Ellie (Martha Scott), teenage daughter Cindy (Mary Murphy) and ten-year-old Ralphie (Richard Eyer) are terrified but beneath their terror they have a resilience that puzzles and enrages the hoodlums.

Glenn is waiting for his girlfriend to arrive with the money they need to make their escape but it turns out to be a very long wait. The state of siege lasts for 48 hours and the pressure starts to tell on both the criminals and their hostages. The question is whether the criminals or the family will break first.

Story-wise there’s nothing startlingly original here but the movie is remarkably well-crafted.

This is a home invasion movie but to a large extent it’s about a whole way of life under threat. In that respect it has some similarities to Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat which dealt with  crime as a mortal threat to ordinary family life.

The tension is enhanced by the fact that the Hilliards have to go about their daily lives, dealing with people coming to the house and even having to go to work and then come home again without being able to reveal the drama taking place in the house. Whenever one of them leaves the house they cannot go to the police because the other family members are still being held hostage. The scenes of ordinary daily life taking place in the street serve to emphasise the tension.

This is a movie about a clash between two different styles of masculinity. Glenn Griffin is the obvious tough guy, the kind of tough guy who relies on violence or the threat of violence. Daniel Hilliard seems like the meek and mild type but he proves to have a psychological toughness that gives him a surprising edge over Griffin. Griffin’s original calculation that a guy with kids would prove easy to overawe is turned on its head. Hilliard’s determination to save his family is a source of strength, not weakness. While the three criminals turn on each other the Hilliard family sticks together.

The three jail-birds in this film seem slightly out of place in the mid-50s. New and much nastier kinds of villains were starting to populate the crime movies of this era and these three by comparison seem somewhat tame. Bogart is playing the kind of role he had played so many times earlier in his career. He is a 1940s-style bad guy. Fortunately he has the acting chops to pull it off and he gives the character the kind of complexity that makes him more than a cardboard bad guy. At times we actually feel sorry for him because we sense that beneath the tough guy exterior there is a great deal of weakness. As the story progresses he seems less formidable while Daniel Hilliard seems to become progressively more formidable. And Griffin also seems aware that the balance of power is gradually shifting against him. This complexity and emotional weakness in Glenn Griffin is the movie’s main claim to being film noir.

Fredric March matches Bogart’s complexity with some complexity of his own. He knows that one mistake could cost him his life and his family but he is determined not to make that mistake. At the end he is prepared to gamble but it’s a carefully thought-out gamble, a gamble from a position of psychological strength rather than weakness.

The supporting players are uniformly good, with Arthur Kennedy being very effective as the cautious sheriff’s deputy Jesse Bard who adopts what the British police of a later era would call a softly, softly approach. All the other cops want to go in with guns blazing but Bard and FBI agent Carson (Whit Bissell) favour a watch-and-wait approach. This provides another instance of the tension between differing styles of masculinity. Bard and Carson are more interested in winning than in demonstrating their tough guy credentials.

William Wyler is at the top of his game, keeping the tensions finely balanced and throwing in a few nice directorial touches like the opening tracking shot.

Paramount’s DVD release is barebones but the transfer is exquisite. At the very low price being asked this one represents excellent value.

The Desperate Hours is a fine piece of film-making with Bogart and March playing off each other superbly. Highly recommended.

Conflict (1945)

Conflict is a somewhat overlooked movie, which is a bit strange given that it’s a 1945 Warner Brothers film noir starring Humphrey Bogart. The reason it’s overlooked may be that this is not Bogart in tough guy mode. Far from it. This is Bogart in loser mode, but he’s not a glamorous loser. More a sad pathetic loser. Which is probably not what most people want from a Bogart movie, which is probably why this movie bombed at the box office in 1945.

Richard Mason (Bogart) and his wife Kathryn (Rose Hobart) have what most of their friends think is is a perfect marriage. The reality is however far from perfect. They don’t really like each other very much and Kathryn is the sort of woman who just can’t help being critical. Especially when she senses a weakness. And it’s not difficult for her to sense weakness in Richard.

The marriage is certainly less than ideal from Richard’s point of view, and there’s a further complication in the form of Kathryn’s kid sister Evelyn (Alexis Smith). Five years ago, when Richard married Kathryn, he didn’t take much notice of Evelyn. She was just a kid. Now she’s all grown up and Richard is definitely noticing her. In fact he now wishes he was married to Evelyn rather than Kathryn. He’s sure that she feels the same way. Not that she’s ever told him, but he’s still sure she feels that way. As Richard will discover, for a middle-aged man to fall in love with a woman half his age isn’t the cleverest thing to do. But they do say there’s no fool like an old fool.

The problem as Richard sees it is that Kathryn is standing in the way of his happiness. And of Evelyn’s. Kathryn has made it quite clear she will never give him a divorce, and certainly not in order to make such a fool of himself. Richard is convinced however that he and Evelyn were meant to be together. If only there was some way to remove the one obstacle to their happiness.

Their friend Dr Mark Hamilton (Sydney Greenstreet) is a psychiatrist. He’s also a shrewd judge of human nature and he doesn’t miss much. He understands Richard better than Richard understands himself, not that that’s a difficult feat since Richard doesn’t understand himself very well at all. And Richard’s understanding of other people is even more flawed.

This situation is of course going to end in tears. In fact it’s going to end in murder. But Richard will find that things don’t seem to have happened at all the way he thought they had and he is soon one very confused man, a confused man who is unravelling rather rapidly.

Arthur T. Horman and Dwight Taylor wrote the screenplay, based on a story by Robert Siodmak and Alfred Neumann. The plot is extremely contrived but it’s contrived in a clever and entertaining way, as long as you are prepared to accept that things happen in movies in ways that are rather improbably complicated compared to the way things happen in real life. That’s why movies are more fun than real life.

German-born director Curtis Bernhardt made some interesting movies around this time. He wasn’t able to make an implausible story seen plausible but he was able to at least make the movie look good. And it looks very good. There are plenty of the visual touches film noir fans enjoy so much. The crucial scene on the mountain road is particularly good, being both suitably sinister and mysterious, and nicely doom-laden. And since the movie involves psychiatry he throws in some of the psychiatry special effects that so delight fans of 1940s psychiatry movies like myself.

Alexis Smith is wasted in a role that doesn’t really go anywhere. She really gets to do very little other than acting as the catalyst that sets the plot in motion. Sydney Greenstreet makes a fine psychiatrist.

Bogart’s character is the one that really matters and he gives a sensitive and complex performance as a man controlled by his own delusions with a grip on reality that becomes steadily more tenuous. He very wisely underplays the part, avoiding the usual tricks that most actors resort to when playing the role of a man self-destructing. Richard does self-destruct, but Bogart keeps it subtle which makes it all the affecting. There’s nothing twitchy

or mannered in his performance. This also allows him to make a sad and unattractive character oddly sympathetic. Bogart wasn’t happy with the film but he gives one of his most effective performances.

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD includes no extras but it does offer an extremely good transfer.

Conflict is not a great movie and is perhaps not a complete success, but it’s stylish and enjoyable and Bogart’s performance alone is sufficient reason to see it. Content-wise it’s more crime melodrama than film noir but it has the style to please noir fans. Recommended.

The Caine Mutiny (1954)

By the end of the 1940s Humphrey Bogart was growing tired of tough guy roles and was seeking to expand his range as an actor. This led him to take on roles in romantic comedies (Sabrina), adventure romances (The African Queen) and offbeat comedy thrillers (Beat the Devil). It also led him to take on one of his most acclaimed roles of the 50s, in the war drama The Caine Mutiny (which earned him his third Oscar nomination).

The Caine Mutiny is a war movie with very little action. It’s more concerned with psychological stresses and moral choices and it deals with those themes in a more complex way than you’d expect in a Hollywood movie.



It is 1944 and Ensign Willie Keith has been assigned to his first shipboard posting. To say that the posting comes as a disappointment to the wealthy young Yale-educated officer would be an understatement. The USS Caine is not exactly the most glamorous ship in the fleet. In fact it’s just about the bottom of the barrel. It’s a battered destroyed converted for minesweeping duties and it may well be the slackest ship in the US Navy. Keith has an opportunity to take a much more glamorous appointment on an admiral’s staff but he is shamed into remaining on board the Caine.

It’s not that that the Caine is an unhappy ship. The captain is easy-going, the atmosphere is relaxed. It’s just that the captain is a bit too easy-going and the atmosphere a bit too relaxed. No-one on the Caine gives a damn. Being an officer on the Caine is a dead end. The Caine is engaged mostly in boring routine duties such a target-towing and there are no opportunities for an ambitious officer to distinguish himself.



All that is about to change when the ship gets a new captain. Lieutenant-Commander Philip Francis Queeg is regular navy, not a reservist, and he believes in doing thing the navy way. He is determined to enforce some discipline. That does not please the Caine’s officers. The previous captain had allowed the executive officer, Lieutenant Maryk (Van Johnson), to more or less run the ship and he’d allowed officers like Lieutenant Tom Keefer (Fred MacMurray) to do whatever they wanted. So Keefer, a cynical intellectual, had divided his time between working on his novel and complaining. Clearly he believes that it’s a shocking injustice that a man of his exceptional gifts should have to do anything as tedious as doing his duty.

Keefer immediately sets out to undermine Queeg’s authority. Unfortunately for Lt-Commander Queeg he’s rather vulnerable to Keefer’s attacks on his authority. Queeg has seen almost continuous active service since the war began and he’s close to being burnt out. His nerves have been shaken and he makes mistakes. With loyal and competent officers to support him he would undoubtedly overcome those problems, but he’s not going to find loyal and competent officers on the Caine.



To compound these problems Queeg has an approach to command that is entirely foreign to the Caine. He believes in the importance of the little things and is enraged by he slovenliness of the crew. And he’s inclined to be prickly and to obsess over minor infractions of regulations. This gives Keefer (who fancies himself as an amateur psychologist) the perfect opportunity to paint the captain as a paranoid neurotic. And even more unfortunately it creates a situation where the basically decent and loyal executive officer Maryk is inclined to listen to Keefer’s promptings. Finally, after Queeg has made several apparent errors of judgment, Maryk is persuaded to relieve Queeg of his command. Maryk and Keith (who was officer of the deck at the time) now face a court martial at which they will have to justify their extraordinary actions.

This rather far-fetched plot could easily have collapsed but it’s saved by two things - the quality of the acting and the ambiguity of the situation that led to the mutiny. Bogart gives a bravura performance. He avoids making Queeg merely a ridiculous figure and gives him a certain tragic dignity. Because this story is a tragedy. Queeg is not a bad man and he’s not even a bad captain, he’s just seen too much action and he’s tired and he’s increasingly isolated as his officers turn on him. Maryk can be seen as an equally tragic figure, a competent officer with a fatal flaw - he’s a weak man who forgets where his duty lies and is manipulated into committing the ultimate act of disloyalty.



The key question is, when the typhoon hits, is it Queeg who loses his nerve or is it Lieutenant Maryk? It’s a question that the movie leaves open and this is its greatest strength. Queeg certainly exhibits signs of instability, but does this actually make him unfit for command? When he asks his officers to support him, in the film’s most moving scene, they ignore him.

Van Johnson’s subtle performance as Maryk is superbly effective. Fred MacMurray was always at his best playing slimy villains and Lieutenant Keefer is as slimy as they come. José Ferrer is excellent as the defence counsel who would have been far happier prosecuting this case.



Edward Dmytryk wisely doesn’t try anything fancy. He has a superb cast and he’s content to allow the actors to carry the story, which they do in fine style. The Caine Mutiny is a fine example of 1950s Hollywood film-making.

Dead Reckoning (1947)

Dead Reckoning, directed by John Cromwell, is a 1947 film noir about a man (played by Humphrey Bogart) who sets out to find out what happened to an army buddy whato disappeared immediately after returning from World War 2. It has all the standard noir elements – smooth gangsters, colourful hoodlums, night clubs, a flashback with voiceover, and of course a femme fatale.

The femme fatale in this case is played by Lizabeth Scott, and she sizzles. But then she always did. Once you hear that husky voice of hers you know you’ve entered the world of film noir. Her performance in this movie has been much criticised, and quite wrongly in my opinion. The movie has its problems but she’s not one of them.



The title is important, dead reckoning being a method of navigation that relies on estimating your position based on estimating your course and speed from a particular starting point, and if you don’t know your starting point accurately you will inevitably get badly lost. And that’s the situation Captain Rip Murdock (Bogart) is in.

Murdock tells the tale in an extended flashback. He and Sergeant Johnny Drake are on their way to Washington. The war is over and they’re both going to collect medals, but Johnny disappears. He disappears because there might be press photographers at the medal presentation and that could be embarrassing since he isn’t Johnny Drake at all. In fact he’s a man wanted for murder who joined up under a false name.



Murdock sets off to find his buddy but what he finds is a badly burned corpse in the morgue. Is the body Johnny’s? Murdock’s starting point is that he knows Johnny couldn’t have been mixed up in murder and know he’s determined to unravel the mystery.

His next step is to find Johnny’s girl. Dusty (Lizabeth Scott) is a singer. He thinks she’s the key to the mystery, and he’s right. But falling in love with her means that Murdock doesn’t want to believe she’s the murderer. He also doesn’t want to believe Johnny is the murderer but somebody shot Dusty’s husband and if it wasn’t Dusty and it wasn’t Johnny then he’s left with an embarrassing lack of plausible suspects.



Dead Reckoning has been accused of having a totally incoherent plot. Which is perfectly true. But this is film noir and plot coherence is less important than atmosphere and style and those qualities it has in spades. It also has enough classic film noir dialogue to keep any fan happy, as when Murdock observes that, “Maybe she was all right. Maybe Christmas comes in July.”

And it has Bogart, and he’s in top form. He knows that Dusty is the kind of girl you should never ever fall in love with but somehow he desperately wants to believe that all his instincts are wrong. Bogart and Scott work well together and Scott not only makes Bogart want to believe in her she makes the audience want to as well even though we know as well as he does that she’s probably no good.



So maybe it’s not one of the great noirs but it’s consistently entertaining, it looks good and it’s dripping with noirness. And it has two of the iconic noir stars demonstrating why they’re such iconic figures. So I say check it out.

Beat the Devil (1953)

Beat the Devil boasts an extraordinarily impressive cast, a clever and witty script (by Truman Capote) and a fine director in John Huston. The story combines adventure, romance and comedy in exotic settings. With those ingredients you’d think this movie couldn’t possibly go wrong, but it bombed at the box-office.

In fact it’s a terrific movie. Its commercial failure at the time may have been due to the fact that it wasn’t the movie that audiences expected, given the title. Rather than a straightforward adventure movie it’s an offbeat comedy. And perhaps it wasn’t what audiences expected from Bogart. Bogart in the 1950s was trying very hard to escape from stereotyped tough guy roles with movies like The African Queen (which gained him an Oscar), The Caine Mutiny (which earned him another Oscar nomination), The Barefoot Contessa and Sabrina. Beat the Devil is as good as any of these movies and better than most but the fact is audiences at the time just didn’t go for it. Its reputation has grown steadily since then.



The plot concerns an assortment of crooks who intend to get rich from buying up land in East Africa containing rich uranium deposits. Whether the uranium actually exists seems uncertain but it doesn’t matter since it’s purely a McGuffin.

Billy Dannreuther (Bogart) is penniless but he’s full of stories about the riches he used to possess. His wife Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) claims to be spiritually English and has tea and crumpets every afternoon. They’re perhaps not quite out-and-out crooks but they’re certainly possessed of flexible ethics. Petersen (Robert Morley) and his three associates are most definitely out-and-out crooks. They’re killing time in a small Italin port city waiting for the ship to Africa. Also en route to Africa are Harry and Gwendolen Chelm. Harry claims to be landed gentry from Gloucestershire. He is in fact an outrageous liar, as is his wife. But then all the other characters in the movie are outrageous liars.



Maria Dannreuther is soon conducting an illicit love affair with Harry Chelm while Harry’s wife Gwendolen is carrying on with Billy. Everyone else is waiting for an opportunity to double-cross someone. Things get even more confused once the ship actually departs, and it all culminates in a shipwreck leaving our assorted crooks stranded in the custody of an Arab governor with a Rita Hayworth obsession.

It was apparently originally going to be a straight adventure film until Huston decided that would be boring and called in Capote to rewrite the script as a comedy. He also decided that if Peter Lorre (as one of the crooks, a German named O’Hara) and Robert Morley wanted to make things up as they went along that was fine by him. That’s what he was doing as director.



All this could be a recipe for disaster. It works because the actors are superb and they’re all in fine form and striking sparks off one another. This is very much an acting ensemble piece. Robert Morley is magnificent but Jennifer Jones is every bit as good as the delightfully eccentric and breathtakingly dishonest Gwendolen Chelm. Bogart gives a free and easy performance and shows he can handle comedy without any problems. Edward Underdown as Harry isn’t the least bit intimidated by the bevy of stars surrounding him and gleefully chews the scenery, as does Ivor Barnard as a murderous British Indian Army officer.

The basic premise is of course very close to that of the movie that established John Huston as a director, The Maltese Falcon, but played purely for comedy this time.



The movie is one that has fallen into the public domain which is both good news and bad news, the good news being that it can be picked up very cheaply on various DVD releases, the bad news being that none of these DVD editions is exactly a pristine transfer. I have the Alpha Video version. Picture quality is fairly rough and there’s a definite lack of contrast but it’s watchable. It’s such a fabulous movie that it would be a great pity to be put off by the lack of a premium DVD edition. On the other hand this is a movie that really deserves a restoration and a good DVD release.

This is an immensely enjoyable romp, and very much a must-see movie.

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

The Roaring Twenties can be seen as a part of the Warner Brothers gangster cycle of the 1930s but it some ways it stands apart from that cycle, as a kind of summing-up of it.

Released in 1939, it has a faintly nostalgic tinge to it and there’s a hint of melancholy. The 20s were already a vanished age and while it had been in some ways an appalling decade it was equally an extraordinary and exciting one. You get a sense watching this movie that some of the vitality had disappeared from life with the end of the Jazz Age and the passing into history of Prohibition, speakeasies, flappers and easy money.

The impressive opening sequence takes us into a shell hole on the Western Front in the First World War where chance has thrown three American soldiers together in what is going to be a fateful meeting. With admirable conciseness the characters of the three men are revealed. Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney) is feisty but likeable. Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn) is virtuous but dull with just a dash of hypocrisy. George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) is self-centred and cruel. In modern therapy-speak we’d call him a psychopath.



The end of the war sees Eddie Bartlett trying to get his old job back, without success. In fact any kind of work is hard to come by for returning veterans. Finally his old pal Danny (Frank McHugh) suggests that since he can only drive his cab twelve hours a day Eddie could drive it for the other twelve hours. Soon chance again takes a hand in the story. Eddie is given a parcel to deliver. He is unaware that the parcel contains bootleg liquor. He is arrested and jailed, but then bailed by the woman he was delivering the package for. She is Panama Smith (Gladys George), she runs a speakeasy, and she provides his introduction to the world of bootlegging.

Success comes quickly to Eddie, at least as far as his criminal career is concerned. He’s not quite so lucky in love. Panama is in love with him but he doesn’t even realise it. He has fallen hard for Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane), an aspiring singer. She had actually written to him during the war, it being a common practice for soldiers at the front to receive letters from women they’d never met. He’d met her at the end of the war only to realise she was still a schoolgirl. He’d beaten a hasty retreat but no their paths have crossed again. He’s in a position to guarantee her career as a singer and she’s happy to allow him to do so. Eddie convinces himself she is in love with him, but she has eyes only for Lloyd (who is now Eddie’s lawyer).



As the truth finally dawns on Eddie that Jean is never going to love him fate has even more unpleasant surprises in store. The stockmarket crash knocks the bottom out of the night-club industry and the repeal of Prohibition spells disaster for bootleggers who haven’t diversified their activities. George Hally has certainly done so and he continues to rise as Eddie hits the skids. The intertwining of the lives of the central characters is not finished yet however and Eddie may yet have a chance for redemption.

There are an extraordinary number of coincidences in the plot, in fact so many that this could easily be a disastrous flaw. It isn’t though, and that’s because director Raoul Walsh’s whole approach to the story has an epic quality to it. It’s like a myth from an age of legend, and myths don’t have to obey the rules of realistic story-telling. In a myth everything should be connected.

Walsh really does a superb job as director. The action sequences are among the best you’ll see in any movie from this era and they stand up extremely well today. Walsh’s sense of pacing is faultless This is a movie made by a great director at the top of his game. There are so many wonderful visual set-pieces in this movie.



Bogart was still struggling to break out of supporting roles and to escape the straitjacket of being typecast as a psycho heavy. This is a supporting role as a psycho heavy, but it’s a good one and Bogart is effectively chilling. The scene right at the beginning where he shoots a young German soldier just seconds before the armistice comes into force remains as disturbing today as it was in 1939.

Priscilla Lane seemed destined for major stardom at this time but it was not to be. In the 40s she got on Jack Warner’s bad side and that was the end of her career. It’s a pity - she’s excellent in this film, a rather ambiguous character who comes across as the sweet girl-next-door but she uses Eddie quite shamelessly. Gladys George is memorable as Panama.



And then there’s Cagney. Cagney played a lot of gangsters but was always able to find some new variation. He hated the idea of merely repeating himself and although he was anxious at this time to break away from gangster movies he took this role because it offered the opportunity to play a gangster who was very different from the cocky sociopath of The Public Enemy. Eddie Bartlett’s weakness as a mobster is that he’s basically a nice guy. While George Hally is totally untroubled by conscience Eddie has a deep-seated desire to do the right thing, a desire he can never shake. And he has a touching emotional vulnerability. Cagney gives one of his greatest performances.

There’s an unexpected degree of emotional depth to his movie. It was criticised at the time for being overly sentimental, a criticism that now seems unjust. In fact it strikes just the right balance. It’s a movie that, considering its subject matter, is surprisingly free of cynicism (which might be the reason that not everyone admires it).

The Region 1 DVD includes a host of extras and can be picked up very cheaply.

High Sierra (1941)

In 1941 High Sierra made stars of both Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino and it was one of the movies that started the trend later to become known as film noir.

Bogart is Roy Earle, a bank robber who has just been released from prison after a pardon was issued, apparently organised by his former underworld colleagues. His old crime boss ants him for a major job on the West Coast, an ambitious hotel robbery. Roy heads west to meet up with the rest of the gang.

On the road he encounters a family who seem to have stepped straight out of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. The family includes an attractive girl with a club foot. The girl is named Velma (Joan Leslie) and this is the first sign that Roy Earle isn’t a mere thug. He helps out the grandfather after a traffic accident and he ends up paying for an operation to fix Velma’s foot. And he falls for Velma.



His rendezvous with the other hotel robbers (Babe and Red) is a fateful one, since he also meets Marie (Ida Lupino). Both Babe and Red want her and Roy is initially inclined to send her back where she came from. He has no problem with dames but he can see that there’s going to be big trouble between the two men over her and someone is likely to get shot. Marie manages to persuade him to let her stay however, our second sign that Roy is a very soft-hearted hoodlum.

In fact it’s soon pretty obvious that Marie is more interested in the middle-aged Roy than she is in either of the two young punks. And he’s getting to be interested in her.

Of course you know the robbery isn’t going to go smoothly, and Roy and Marie end up on the run. Accompanied by an engaging mutt named Pard. Roy was also too soft-hearted to leave the dog behind. You’ve heard of the Whore with a Heart of Gold. Well Roy Earle is the Gangster with a Heart of Gold.



Stylistically it’s perhaps more like a western than a film noir with most of the crucial scenes, including the climactic ones with Roy and Marie on the run, taking place in the great outdoors, in the foothills of the Sierras. Raoul Walsh was an ideal director for this type of movie and does his usual very fine job.

The script (by John Huston and W. R. Burnett based on Burnett’s novel) stretches credibility quite a bit. It has the kind of noir cynicism mixed with romanticism that you get in several of Huston’s noirish movies, especially The Asphalt Jungle (also based on a W. R. Burnett novel).



The problems with the script don’t really matter with both Bogart and Lupino in great firm. Bogart’s career had taken years to take off with several false starts but by the beginning of the 40s things were finally falling into place for him. Perhaps most importantly, Warner Brothers were starting to make movies that were tailor-made for him. Lupino had had similar problems. She’d been making movies for a decade (she was 13 when she scored her first movie role in Britain) but had failed to find her niche. In 1940 Bogart and Lupino both landed great roles in They Drive By Night which set them up for their breakthrough in High Sierra.

Bogart is extremely impressive, especially given that the character as written is scarcely believable. But Bogart makes us believe in him.



One of the more interesting aspects of the movie is that we have Joan Leslie as Velma set up to be the good girl and Lupino as Marie set up to be the bad girl, but that’s not how it pans out. Marie is as complex as Roy Earle but she’s more convincingly written. Lupino is superb.

It’s only real claim to noirness is that we have two sympathetic protagonists who clearly have the odds stacked against them. If it isn’t a real film noir it’s still a fine example of 1940s Warner Brothers film-making.

The Petrified Forest (1936)

The Petrified Forest was the movie that finally put Humphrey Bogart on the map as an actor. In 1936 his career was going nowhere fast until Leslie Howard persuaded Jack Warner to give him his chance in this movie, and the rest (as they say) is history.

Leslie Howard is penniless drifter Alan Squier, a failed writer and intellectual whose wealthy wife has finally tired of him and found herself a new pet, a promising young painter. Hitch-hiking through the Arizona desert he stumbles into a gas station and diner in the middle of nowhere. The daughter of the proprietor is Gabby Maple (Bette Davis) and her dreams are all of escape to France, to civilisation. She is immediately infatuated by Alan’s charm and his intellectual pretensions. She wants to go to France with him. Alan is suffering from a very severe case of world-weariness and self-pity and doesn’t want to inflict himself on a woman. He is humiliated enough when she has to pay for his meal, and decides to skulk off into the desert to continue his wallowings in self-hatred.

At roughly the halfway point of the movie the tome changes from philosophical musings and romance to suspense and suppressed violence, with the arrival of notorious gangster and killer Duke Mantee (Bogart). They’ve stolen a car from a rich couple who find themselves held hostage at the diner, along with their chauffeur, Alan, Gabby and Gabby’s her drunken old grandfather who is always boring everyone with his stories of his supposed youthful encounter with Billy the Kid. While Alan and Duke Mantee appear on the surface to have little in common, one being a passive over-sensitive intellectual and the other being a desperate and vicious man of action, Alan believe they are kindred spirits. Both are doomed, both are outsiders, both are in love with death. It appears that for both men this love affair is about to be consummated.

Seen today this movie seems incredibly stagey and outrageously talky. That it works is due almost entirely to the three leads. Leslie Howard makes Alan likeable and sympathetic when he so easily have been annoying and pompous. Bette Davis is touchingly naïve, high-spirited and amusing. Bogart, whose performance apparently owed a great deal to Leslie Howard’s advice on toning down his acting, gives us the first glimpse of the characterisation he would later perfect and which would make him a bona fide star.

The philosophising about the conflict between civilisation and nature, between the Old World and the New, between refection and action, life and death, etc, would have been little more than the 1930s equivalent of pop psychobabble if delivered by anyone other than Leslie Howard, It makes it sound almost profound. There’s a very 1930s atmosphere of impending chaos and social collapse, of civilisation at the end of its tether.

The extreme staginess, the obviously fake backgrounds to the outdoor scenes shot on a sound stage, the confining of the action to a single room, all these things could have counted against the film but in fact they enhance its impact, giving it a stifling and artificial feel that complements the theatrical performances.

And while there’s very little action, when it does come the sudden outburst of extreme violence has a tremendous impact.

This is in many ways a landmark movie, a link between the Hollywood movies of the 30s and those of the following decade, and to a certain extent an anticipation of the American style of film noir that emerged in the 40s. And the three central acting performances are more than sufficient reason to make this a must-watch movie.