The Chris Moeller Archives

Tough Without a Gun

Stefan Kamfer has already written a crackerjack book about Groucho Marx (entitled "Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx"). His latest is a biography of movie legend Humphrey Bogart called "Tough Without a Gun." Slate's Tom Shone has written a review of the book that beautifully describes Bogart's screen appeal. (Maybe Shone should write a Bogart bio, too.) It uses phrases like "the gradual erasure of lived experience" to describe how older actors, male and female, have disappeared from Hollywood's consciousness. Bogart was already 41 when he struck it big on the big screen (in "High Sierra"), and he would be dead of cancer by 57, but between those ages, he put together a string of such successful films that he would eventually be selected (in 1999) as the greatest male film star of all-time by the American Film Institute.

His classic films "Casablanca", "The Big Sleep", and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" made the CM Blog's Top 50 list in 2004-05, but I want to advocate tonight for a different one-- "Dark Passage," which is sort of the forgotten film of the four that Bogart made with Lauren Bacall during the 1940s (the others are "The Big Sleep," "To Have or Have Not," and "Key Largo.") Load "Dark Passage" in your Netflix queue and look forward to having yourself an enjoyable evening one night soon.

It's a very peculiar film. Bogart, hard-boiled as always, is an escapee from prison. The film begins with the escape scene, and with the very unusual employment of a first-person camera technique from Bogart's perspective. The camera is Bogie. We see the face of his character only briefly when it's seen through the rear-view mirror of a truck, and it's not Bogart's face at all that we see, it's that of a different, unrecognizable actor. But we do hear the Bogart voice, and that iconic lisp.

The Bogart character is hiding in a barrel that rolls off the bed of the escape truck, and we continue to view the story through his lens for about the first third of the film before the character undergoes clandestine plastic surgery (from a strange and sinister doctor) to change his appearance and help evade the law. The "after" appearance of the face-lifted criminal is, of course, that of our star, Humphrey Bogart. Though admittedly-gimmicky, it's a very clever introduction to our hero, and that's all just in the first half hour of the film!

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A New York attorney named Chase Madar has written a must-read essay in support of U.S. Army Private and patriot Bradley Manning. It's presented uniquely by Madar as an attorney's hypothetical opening argument for Manning's legal defense (if the Justice Department ever concedes to give the man his day in court, that is). In this "opening argument" structure, it becomes a terrific text for understanding a very complex story in simple terms.

Citing the Nuremberg Principles, which were long ago incorporated into the U.S. Army Field manual, Madar writes, "Our soldiers have a solemn duty not to obey illegal orders, and Pfc. Manning upheld this duty. General Peter Pace’s statement on a soldier’s overriding duty to stop the torture and abuse of prisoners, whatever his or her orders, is not just high-minded public relations; it’s the law of the land."

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Jerry Sloan has stepped down as head coach of the NBA's Utah Jazz. What does this development mean for Cardinals baseball fans, you ask? It means that Tony LaRussa is now the longest-tenured head coach/manager of any of the major North American team sports. He was hired by the Cards on October 23, 1995.

posted by CM @ 8:32 PM