Word: spading
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When Bogart played Sam Spade in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1941), he saw through the deceptions of Mary Astor, and turned her over to the police. When he played Marlowe in Chandler's The Big Sleep (1946), he got there first, and Eddie Mars walked out the door to be gunned down by his own henchmen. He had control. Elliot Gould as Marlowe has none. Sure, he has the Bogart style--the self-confident, sarcastic attitude towards the police, the crooks, and even the incompetent gunsel who tails him. But he utterly lacks the substance. When...
Alas, the picture does not come off because execution does not match conception. Simon's literary palette is as lacking in delicate hues as Director Moore's visual one. It is bold to plunk Rick's cafe down in Sam Spade's San Francisco. It is even mildly funny to have Victor Laszlo require his wife's old lover to help him get not letters of transit so he can escape the Nazis but a liquor license so he can open a French restaurant in Oakland. But when the song that reminds Rick...
...Harvard, he parked his Model T on the ellipse behind the White House and joined the local Monitor crew. He trod the White House beat while Warren G. Harding entertained Nan Britton in a coat closet, and when tight-lipped Calvin Coolidge gravely turned over a ceremonial spade of earth one Arbor Day and, asked to say a few words, pronounced: "That's a fine fishworm." He called Franklin D. Roosevelt "the greatest President of my time," respected Dwight Eisenhower, was dazzled by John F. Kennedy and never did like Richard Nixon. "If you live long enough, people confuse...
...hard-boiled masterpiece on his first feature assignment for Warner Brothers. Like Welles, Huston grew up around the greasepaint. And like Welles, Huston came to films with a gleeful yet prodigiously discriminating eye for characature and atmosphere-creating jargon. He handles Humphrey Bogart perfectly in the role of Sam Spade--by letting Bogart do Bogart, but without the "sentimentalist" soft spots of Rick in "Casablanca" or the nervousness of the hunted criminal in "Petrified Forest." Bogart is nothing more nor less than leather-skinned in this role: cool, jaded, manipulative. Dashiell Hammit included a last scene in his book during...
...rest of the cast comes alive in the superb musical numbers. Showing classical grace in his dancing, Hud (Duquincy Cooks) sparkles the company's renditions of "Colored Spade" and the drug-induced "Walking in Space." Leslye Freeman, as Dionne, delivers a spicey, soul version of "White Boys." The songs steam along with the powerful backing of a rock band, which builds to a fervent finale in the title number. But the band becomes successfully muted for the soul-searching lyrics of "Easy to Be Hard" and "Where...