Word: bogarting
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Little Caesar with Edgar G. Robinson, 7:30, Key Largo, with Bogart and Bacall, 9 p.m., Public Enemy, with Cagney, 10:45, Friday through Sunday, Feb. 28-March...
...film "festivals" starting in Boston and Cambridge this week celebrate what are probably the cinema's two most popular genres--the whodunit and the skin flick. In the sixties film festivals tended to showcase a great actor or director, and the nearly constant Bergman and Bogart festivals at places like the Brattle Square are holdovers from those days. Now they tend to focus on particular genres. These festivals aren't Hitchoock festivals or even Radley Metzger festivals; they aim to show the whole range of detective films and erotic films, the good, the bad, and the commercial, the typical...
...clue, is an icy cynicism. The detective's ultimate values are never really cynical--if they were he'd be the criminal and not the detective, whether he's Margaret Rutherford playing Agatha Christie's insufferable Miss Marples or Alec Guinness playing Chesterton's quaint Father Brown or Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade explaining, after Miles Archer's murder, that you have a duty to your partner...
...witness leaves the cabin, one of the two roundly asserts, "He did it" and the other scoffs; when the next witness leaves, they reverse roles. And Lauren Bacall produces the murder weapon from her pocket book with the most roguish look on her face since she told Humphrey Bogart how to whistle in To Have and Have...
Murder on the Orient Express emphasizes the sentimental aspects of the Agatha Christie novel it's based on. It presents no layer of cynicism to be penetrated, the kind of tough-minded shell Bogart provided to make sure the final pill wasn't too sweet to swallow. The moral situation on the Orient Express is black and white, and the detective shares everyone's assumptions about right and wrong. There can be no classic confrontations because at bottom everyone agrees. This film doesn't have the kind of hypnotic effect that leaves you spouting its dialogue days later...