The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir by Hirsch Foster

Author:Hirsch, Foster [Hirsch, Foster]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780786726776
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2008-11-25T05:00:00+00:00

Searching for the gang that killed his wife, Dick Powell in Cornered sheds some of the poise of his impersonation of Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet.

Humphrey Bogart, the perfect noir icon, the compleat forties tough guy.

With his stiff face and taut voice, his rhythmed recitation (accented by the famous lisp) of the roguish Hammett-Chandler dialogue, Bogart works in a monochromatic style. His delivery is as lean as his physique. For him, less is certainly more. And yet the actor’s pared down, straight-ahead, no-fuss manner communicates a subtle range of feeling, from waggish humor to romantic interest. Throughout both key films, there are chinks in the tough guy armor, moments when the actor drops the rigor mortis mask. The private person beneath the investigator’s facade is revealed in a delightful scene in The Maltese Falcon, where, after Spade laces into Kaspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), laying it on thick, he kicks up his heels in glee on his way to the elevator, pleased with his own performance.

Bogart had the perfect face for noir, a face filled with character. Though he tried, Bogart could not conceal worry or regret or the sadness that always seemed to gnaw at him. His mask is thus different from the idealized ones of Lake and Ladd, from which all human concern seems to be erased. In contrast to their unblemished facade, Bogart has a frankly homely face—a mug—and he doesn’t look at all like anyone’s stereotyped concept of a movie star. Ravaged and sad-eyed, he looks positively unhealthy. With a few minor adjustments, Bogart can easily appear sinister, a quality which was exploited for most of his early career at Warners, when he played heavies. Curling his lip in a perpetual sneer, furrowing his brow in scorn or menace, the early Bogart looked surly and dyspeptic. The startling originality of his presence, though, was not realized until 1941, in both The Maltese Falcon and High Sierra, a swan song to the thirties gangster in which he played a sentimental con infatuated with a crippled girl and loved in turn by a mature and self-effacing woman (Ida Lupino). In both these roles, his innate decency collided interestingly with echoes of the snarling, embittered characters he had played as second banana to Edward G. Robinson’s emphatic tough guys in crime dramas of the thirties. The result is wonderfully shaded, with the integrity and humanity of his Spade and Roy Earle qualified by an underlying harshness. Bogart balanced astringency with a fleeting sentimentality and romanticism in a way that no other actor ever has.

Bogart, then, has the face of a man of enormous feeling kept in check—he is clearly a man with churning insides beneath the still mask. His gaze is direct yet wary; the scornful twist of the lips does not belie the sense of honor that turns him into a hero no matter what kind of role he is playing. The face hard yet vulnerable, the cold gazing eyes human and wounded, Bogart is the archetypal noir loner.

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