Word: bogarts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...released, perhaps forever. The Marx Brothers, for example, remain as inseparable from the '30s and '40s as F.D.R. More than any other stars, they bridge vaudeville, the silents, the talkies and TV itself. But Fields, who always blew his cool, exerts an appeal rivaled only by Bogart, who never blew his. Both men nurse a surly integrity and loathing for any Establishment except the neighborhood bar-attitudes that delight today's young cynical idealists...
Some movie fans just won't settle for sitting through endless reruns of their idol's films or collecting faded photographs. San Francisco Restaurateur Frederick Reeve has always had a passion for Humphrey Bogart, and when he heard of plans to scrap Bogie's African Queen, the grand old tub in which he and Katharine Hepburn chugged down the Ulanga in their 1951 movie, well, something had to be done. So Reeve flew to Nairobi, bought the old girl for $750, now plans to refurbish her for $10,000 more and haul the craft around the country...
...establishment of middle-class British values on a boat in the jungle must have interested both Agee and Collier as script-writers; the published screenplay in Agee On Film lavishes detail on Cockney inflection and deliberately tortured syntax. Here, Huston's casting defeats the intent: however much Bogart accentuates his buck teeth, he is largely out of place as a Cockney mechanic; his best moments are asides and wisecracks reminiscent of the two Hawks films, The Big Sleep and To Have And Have Not, and he must rely heavily on a stylized comedy technique borrowed wholesale from vintage Cary Grant...
...Huston simply fails to give either Bogart or Hepburn enough to do in The African Queen. The romance pastoral is established, but only at the expense of character development: Huston piles close-ups of Bogart and Hepburn on top of one another, all impeccably framed by Cardiff, all suggesting nothing more than bovine contentment. Ultimately, the comic timing of Huston and his actors save The African Queen from tedium: Hepburn's superb reactions to Bogart's gin-swilling equal Bogart's own anguish at watching her dispose of it, bottle by bottle. Lines in the printed script easily passed...
...development of theme through characterization and narrative. In The African Queen, the pretentions of melodrama cancel-out the element of romance, providing only an irritating absence of clarity of purpose. Considering its creators, The African Queen represents a sad, if entertaining, meeting of people whose careers were moving downhill. Bogart and Hepburn had made by far their best films, she for Cukor and Bogart for Hawks; Huston's reputation as a director grew deservedly tarnished, and the best of his later films (Moby Dick, The Misfits) were critical failures; only Agee, in writing The Night of the Hunter, managed...