Word: bogarting
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...world out there. Tabloids run factoids about humanoids on steroids. In a world gone synthetic, why should movies offer something as organic as a hero? Welcome, then, to the age of the heroid. In the old days, a - hero like Bogart had brains and guts but also a nagging heart and the seductive scowl of obsession. Often he failed; sometimes he died. He was real: us, with muscles. A heroid, though, is just the muscles. He owes more to comic strips than to romantic or detective fiction. Never really alive, a heroid cannot die; he must be available...
Robert Towne's plot recalls the old James Cagney melodramas in which righteous Pat O'Brien fought for his soul and rotten Humphrey Bogart tried to perforate his body. But the moral is utterly today: it's about going straight without paying the price. As handsome and slack muscled as a surfer past his prime, the movie renounces ambiguity for confusion. In the end, like an old set of tires or a frayed friendship, Tequila Sunrise just wears...
Chandler's most immortal creation -- co-produced by Humphrey Bogart -- was the quixotic figure of the gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, private eye and public conscience, sitting behind his pebbled-glass door with an office bottle and a solitary game of chess. What made Marlowe special was simply the fact that he was nothing special, no genius like Sherlock Holmes, no Connoisseur model like James Bond. Just an underpaid drudge with, as one mobster says, "no dough, no family, no prospects, no nothing" -- except a habit of making other people's worries his own, and a gift for walking in on corpses...
...best ones he had ever seen starred Bogart and Bacall...
...Blanc's memoir makes clear, his heart and vocal cords belong to the real Toontown, Warner Bros., in the days when Yosemite Sam and Pepe Le Pew were as popular as Bogart and Boyer. For those who care, Blanc reveals the secrets of the stars: why Bugs Bunny speaks with a Brooklyn accent, why Porky stutters, and why Daffy Duck lisps. Those who do not care, as Blanc concludes, are desthpicable...