Word: bogarts
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...among all her movies and plays, The African Queen is the one that remains vividly in memory. For good reason. Tough shoot -- they don't come any tougher. Heat. Bugs. Snakes. Minimum crew, equipment. Maximum heightening of the senses deep in exotic country. Sensitive descriptions of people, landscape. Plus. Bogart a total pro -- on time, lines letter-perfect, hating his hairpiece. John Huston an elusive macho sprite -- flitting through the jungle dropping big game, occasional shrewd directorial insights (gave Hepburn Eleanor Roosevelt as role model...
...plaque on the left wall lists the names of the married couples who first met here. There have been 550 or so. They don't keep track of divorces. There's a bar on the right. You shoot your cuffs, walk over the way Bogart would, quiet and self- assured, order the usual, a salt-free seltzer water, slice of lime to give it a jolt...
...arbitrary. Why, for example, is Sartre listed but not Camus? Why Norman Mailer but not Saul Bellow or John Updike? Leonardo but not Michelangelo? Venereal disease but not AIDS? Why Beverly Hills but not St. Louis? Cole Porter but not Leonard Bernstein? Muammar Gaddafi but not Francois Mitterrand? Bogart but not Olivier or even Cagney? Such questions guarantee that the book will indeed spur discussions all summer long, but perhaps not the ones the author intended...
With the pastiche ideology of post-modernism the theater has lost the appetite for the strong emotions and extravagant gestures that once were associated with the word "dramatic." Somehow, a cheesy melodrama like Dietrich's Dishonoured or Bogart's Maltese Falcon seems truer to the human heart than any new work I've seen on a stage in years. The theater, always a comfortable haven for dry intellectuals, may well have hypertrophied to the point that it is just an expensive substitute for The David Letterman Show...
Also dealing indirectly with war but far less blunt is Casablanca (Brattle Theater). Probably the most famous film of all time, Casablanca actually has an illogical and melodramatic plot, centering around a cynical American (Humphrey Bogart) who runs into an old flame (Ingrid Bergman) from his days in Paris. Under the influence of the striking young woman, Rick progresses from a selfish and apolitical bar-owner to a member of the French resistance against the Nazis. Though lacking the chemistry of Bogart and Bacall, Bogie and Bergman turn this rickety plot into a timeless film about sacrificing personal interest...