Movie Monday: High Sierra

Movie Monday: High Sierra

The 1940s and 1950s are considered the “classic period of American film noir,” although that term wasn’t used until much later. Instead, the movies were referred to as melodramas, and the plot typically revolved around a crime of some sort and often featured a “hard-boiled detective.”

Based on the W.R. Burnett novel of the same name, High Sierra released eighty-five years ago this month and stars Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, an actress with a long career, yet who is often forgotten when listing the leading ladies of the time.

Bogart is convicted bank robber Roy Earle, whose release from prison is the result of bribing the governor. Big Mac M’Gann is responsible because he wants a bank heist led by Roy on his behalf. Gang members include Red Hattery and Babe Kozak who brings his “dime-a-dance” girlfriend Marie Garson (played by Lupino). The robbery goes wrong as does the getaway, resulting in the deaths of Red and Babe. Roy and Marie head across country to discover the Big Mac is also dead having suffered a heart attack.

Former policeman Jake Kranmer has taken over Big Mac’s operation and tries to force Roy to give up

the jewels. Instead, Roy kills him, then tries to fence the jewels. After seeing the front-page news about the robbery that includes Roy’s photo and a description of Marie, Roy sends Marie to Las Vegas and returns to the get his money from the fence. Things go from bad to worse when Roy conducts a stick up for money to fill his gas tank and his recognized by local police. He heads into the mountains where he is pursued by law enforcement. The shootout that occurs is considered the highlight of the film.

Performances by both Bogart and Lupino were widely praised at the time and continue to be held in high regard. His portrayal of the “good bad man” creates a sympathetic character and adds depth to the quintessential, sometimes cliched gangster. About Lupino, one critic indicated she was “impressive as the adoring moll.” The film changed the way studio executives saw Bogart who until then had appeared in mostly “B movies. Warner Bros. realized they had a star on their hands.

With a budget of just under a half-million dollars, the movie made more than $1.5 million in the US and other markets. Despite its excellent reception High Sierra did not receive any Academy Award nominations, however, it was recognized by the National Board of Review as part of its top ten films for 1941.

The 1949 film Colorado Territory starring Joel McCrea and Virginia Mayo is also based on the novel as is the 1955 movie I Died A Thousand Times (Jack Palance and Shelley Winters). Two radio broadcasts were made on the Screen Guild Theater: 1942 with Bogart and Claire Trevor and 1944 with Bogart and Lupino.

Have you seen this classic?

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Spies & Sweethearts

She wants to do her part. He’s just trying to stay out of the stockade. Will two agents deep behind enemy lines find capture… or love?

1942. Emily Strealer is tired of being told what she can’t do. Wanting to prove herself to her older sisters and do her part for the war effort, the high school French teacher joins the OSS and trains to become a covert operative. And when she completes her training, she finds herself parachuting into occupied France with her instructor to send radio signals to the Resistance.

Major Gerard Lucas has always been a rogue. Transferring to the so-called “Office of Dirty Tricks” to escape a court-martial, he poses as a husband to one of his trainees on a dangerous secret mission. But when their cover is blown after only three weeks, he has to flee with the young schoolteacher to avoid Nazi arrest.

Running for their lives, Emily clings to her mentor’s military experience during the harrowing three-hundred-mile trek to neutral Switzerland. And while Gerard can’t bear the thought of his partner falling into German hands, their forged papers might not be enough to get them over the border.

Can the fugitive pair receive God’s grace to elude the SS and discover the future He intended?

Purchase Link: https://books2read.com/u/m0Od9l

Photo credits:
Movie Poster: By Heritage Auctions, Fair use.
Bogart and Lupino: Movie Still, Warner Bros.
Bogart: mptvimages.com

Movie Monday: Conflict

Movie Monday: Conflict

Filmed in 1943 but not released until 1945, Warner Brothers’ film noir Conflict starred Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, and Alexis Smith (an actress who made quite a few movies, but I’d not heard of). A cameo appearance is also made by the Maltese Falcon statue. The movie is based on The Pentacle by Alfred Neumann and Robert Siodmak. Despite the “heavy-hitting” cast, the movie didn’t do well.

Bogart and Greenstreet starred in several movies together, but Conflict is the only one in which Bogart played the villain. And played it he did even though he was somewhat blackmailed to take the role. Several sources quote the actor telling Jack Warner “I’m sorry, Jack. I just can’t do it. My stomach will not let me. I am an honest man, and I have to be honest with myself in this manner. If you want to get tough with me…I will feel that I have lots a friend.” However, he accepted after Warner threatened to block production of Passage to Marseille or cast a different actor in the lead role.

On the surface, the plot is a good one and fairly straightforward: Richard and Kathryn Mason appear to

be a happily married couple. Unfortunately, Richard has fallen in love with Kathryn’s younger sister, but he’s resigned to the fact that his wife won’t grant him a divorce. Kathryn derides him every chance she gets, and a series of events occur prompts him to murder her. After the police determine that he “did the deed,” they set him up with a bit of gaslighting to catch him. A pawn shop ticket is mailed to him, and the envelope appears to be addressed in Kathryn’s writing. When he goes to the shop, he finds her locket and what appears to be her signature in the register. He takes the police to the shop, but the locket is gone, and the register is different. Then on the street, he sees a woman who looks and dresses like Kathryn, so he follows her to her apartment, but it’s vacant and no one is inside.

Now convinced Kathryn is still alive, he returns to the crime scene to see if her body is still in the car where he left her. Bad news for Richard: the police are waiting for him.

Bogart and Greenstreet were both lauded for their performances, however, more than one critic commented that neither actor was “good enough to save the film.” Complaints of too many artificial devices and plot holes litter most of the reviews of the time. Since then, critics have been a bit more forgiving.

Personally, I thought the movie’s suspense, cinematography, and psychological aspects make it very watchable, especially for those who enjoy “noir” films.

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A Lesson in Love

He thinks he’s too old. She thinks she’s too young. Can these teachers learn that love defies all boundaries?

Born and raised in London, Isobel Turvine knows nothing about farming, but after most of the students in her school evacuate during Operation Pied Piper, she’s left with little to do. Then her friend Margery talks her into joining the Women’s Land Army, and she finds herself working the land at a manor home in Yorkshire that’s been converted to a boys’ school. A teacher at heart, she is drawn to the lads, but the handsome yet stiff-necked headmaster wants her to stick to farming.

Left with an arm that barely works from the last “war to end all wars,” Gavin Emerson agrees to take on the job of headmaster when his school moves from London to Yorkshire, but he’s saddled with the quirky manor owner, bickering among his teachers, and a gaggle of Land Army girls who have turned the grounds into a farm. When the group’s blue-eyed, raven-haired leader nearly runs him down in a car, he admonishes her to stay in the fields, but they are thrown together at every turn. Can he trust her not to break his heart?

Pre-order link: https://amzn.to/3YHgUb0

Movie Monday: The African Queen

Movie Monday: African Queen

While growing up one of my favorite things to do was watch old (1930s and 1940s) movies with my dad. He was (and still is) a huge fan of Humphrey Bogart, so I’ve seen every film he ever made, one of which I watched countless times: The African Queen. Yet, despite my knowledge of the film, I didn’t remember it was set in 1914 or that it was based on the novel of the same name by C.S. Forester, a British author who wrote mostly adventure stories about naval warfare.

For those who haven’t seen it, the premise is that Samuel (Robert Morely) and Rose (Katharine Hepburn) Saylor are brother and sister English Methodist missionaries in German East Africa. Their mail and supplies are regularly delivered by the steamboat African Queen, captained by the Canadian Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart). After war breaks out between Germany and Britain, the siblings decide to stay in Kungdu. Tragically, German troops burn the village and take the villagers away to be pressed into serve. Samuel protests the action and is struck by a soldier which ultimately kills him. Charlie and Rose escape in the African Queen. The rest of the movie is the thrills and chills of their journey to safety and love.

Hepburn does a great job of playing the strait-laced missionary against Bogart’s “gin-swilling” rogue, a

character for which he would win his only Academy Award. According to one source “although the screenplay was written with little humor in mind, the chemistry between Bogart and Hepburn was so apparent that director John Huston advised his stars to improvise witty banter.”

The movie was filmed in the Belgian Congo, Uganda, and Turkey during which the rough conditions were difficult for the actors and the crew, many becoming ill over the course of the shooting. The same sight claims “Bogart later boasted that he was one of the few to stay healthy through the shoot, attributing the accomplishment to his drinking of whiskey instead of the local water.”

Here are few fun facts:

• The African Queen was actually the L.S. Livingston, which had been a working diesel boat for 40 years. The steam engine was a prop, and the real diesel engine was hidden under stacked crates of gin and other cargo. It is now docked next to the Holiday Inn in Key Largo, FL, just off US Highway 1.
• Lauren Bacall famously ventured along for the filming in Africa to be with husband Humphrey Bogar. She played den mother during the trip, making camp and cooking. This also marked the beginning of her life-long friendship with Katharine Hepburn.
• The movie was shot mostly on location in Africa, but the water scenes were shot in England - fearing it would be too dangerous to film those on location.
• John Huston wanted to put real leeches on Humphrey Bogart, but he refused. They compromised by using rubber leeches - with real ones on set with a breeder just to make him queasy. A shot using real leeches was filmed using a double.
• It has widely been believed that London's population of feral Ring-Necked Parakeets originated from birds who escaped the filming of this movie.

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBDRAp4Or8

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Love and Chocolate

She just needs a job. He wants a career. Is there room in their hearts for love?

Ilsa Krause and her siblings are stunned to discover their father left massive debt behind upon his death. To help pay off their creditors and save the farm, she takes a job at Beck’s Chocolates, the company her father despised and refused to supply with milk. Then she discovers her boss is Ernst Webber, her high school love who unceremoniously dumped her via letter from college. Could life get any more difficult?

A freshly-minted university diploma in his hand, Ernst Webber lands his dream job at Beck’s Chocolates. His plans to work his way up the ladder don’t include romantic entanglements, then Ilsa Krause walks back into his life resurrecting feelings he thought long dead. However, her animosity makes it clear she has no interest in giving him a second chance. Can he get her to change her mind? Does he want to?

Purchase link: https://books2read.com/u/mdQerZ

Movie Monday: To Have and Have Not

Movie Monday: To Have and Have Not

The 1944 film, To Have and Have Not, is often cited as being “loosely” based on Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel of the same name, however, the movie bears little resemblance to the book. According to one source,* “Legend has it that Hemingway and film director Howard Hawks went on a ten-day fishing trip on which Hawks continued his futile efforts to get Hemingway to write scripts for him. Finally, Hawks told him, “I can make a picture out of your worst story.” Reportedly, they decided To Have and Have Not met the criteria, but Hemingway continued to assert that Hawks couldn’t “make anything out of that.”

Jules Furthman wrote the first screenplay, and William Faulkner the second. The location was changed from Cuba to Martinique in the interest of good international relations. Met with mixed reviews by the critics, To Have and Have Not was (and still is) compared to Casablanca. Even the head of publicity at Warner Bros. is reported to have said, “not only a second Casablanca but two and a half times what Casablanca was.”

• The film teams Humphrey Bogart with Howard Hawks again
• The story is set against the war in an exotic French territory
• Bogart’s character is trying to run a business but gets involved in local politics and a girl
• Several scenes include a clever piano player in the café bar

Variety posited that the film was inferior to Casablanca and other melodramas, and Time called it a

“tinny romantic melodrama which millions of cinemaddicts have been waiting for ever since Casablanca." Another critic, James Agee commented that Going My Way was better because To Have and Have Not focused too much on “character and atmosphere” rather than plot.

Rather than the book’s character of ordinary-fisherman Harry who is pushed into the black market of running contraband between Cuba and Florida because of the Depression, the movie features sport-fishing boat captain Harry (who is called Steve) living under the occupation of pro-German Vichy France. The island is littered with sympathizers of Free France (including Bacall’s character Marie “Slim” Browning). Other changes (fortunately), are the omission of episodes of racism, misogyny, bullying, and spousal abuse.

To Have and Have Not was 19-year-old Lauren Bacall’s first movie, and the on-screen romance turned into a real-life affair. The couple would marry the following year after Bogart divorced his third wife and appear in three more films together (The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo). Several sources indicate that because the film was Bacall’s debut, there were fewer scenes originally written for her character in case she didn’t do well. Instead, the chemistry between her and Bogart was so palpable, scenes between the two were added.

Budgeted at slightly more than $1.6 million, the movie earned $3.65M at the box office and $5.257 worldwide.

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The Mechanic & The MD

All’s fair in love and war. Or so they say.

High school and college were a nightmare for Doris Strealer and being an adult isn’t much better. Men won’t date a woman of her height, and they don’t understand her desire to repair car engines rather than work as a nurse or a teacher. When her father’s garage closes, and no one will hire a female mechanic, she joins the Red Cross Motor Corps, finally feeling at home. Until she comes face to face with her past in the form of Ronald McCann, the most popular boy in school.

On the brink of a successful career as a surgeon, Ron's plans crumble when he’s drafted and assigned to an evacuation hospital in England, the last place he expects to run into a former schoolmate. The gangly tomboy who was four years behind him in high school has transformed into a statuesque beauty, but a broken engagement in college leaves him with no desire to risk his heart ever again.

Will the hazards of war make or break a romance between this unlikely couple?

Purchase Link: https://books2read.com/u/3RNpjY


*https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/classic-40s-movie-to-have-and-have-not-7b0d2d7532a9

Movie Monday: Casablanca - A Movie About the Resistance

Movie Monday: Casablanca - 

A Movie about the Resistance

Few people have not heard of Casablanca, the 1942 film featuring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid that tells the story of a cynical American ex-patriate living in Morocco (at that time a French protectorate) whose ex-girlfriend and her husband show up on the run from the Nazis. Rick (Bogart) must choose between the love he still holds for her and helping her Czech-resistance leader husband escape. Based on the unproduced stage play Everybody Comes to Rick's, the screenplay was purchased by Warner Bros. for a whopping $20,000 (as compared to The Maltese Falcon purchased for a paltry $8,000).

Despite its appearance, the entire movie was shot in the Burbank studios with one exception - that of the opening scene when Heinrich Strasser is flying past an airplane hanger - which was filmed at the Van Nuys Airport. Filming took place over ten weeks and cost about $950,000. Post-production and release were then rushed because of what was actually happening during the war. The movie premiered in New York City at the Hollywood Theater on November 26, 1942 rather than in 1943 as planned because the publicity people wanted it to coincide with the Allied invasion of North Africa and the capture of Casablanca. Eight weeks later Casablanca was then released wide to coincide with the Casablanca Conference, the high-level meeting between Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt in Casablanca.

Intriguingly, some of the actors had experienced the war personally. S.Z. Sakall, a Jewish-Hungarian,

Public Domain

lost his three sisters in a concentration camp. Helmut Dantine had spent time in a concentration camp, fleeing Europe after his release. Curt Bopis was a German-Jewish actor and refugee, and Curt Bois, was a German film star who'd fled his homeland. He would often be cast as a Nazi in American films. Director Michael Curtiz was a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant whose family members were refugees.

The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three, including best picture, and although was not expected to do more than break even, Casablanca was a box office hit. The US Library of Congress selected the film in 1989 as one of the first for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." And you'll notice, there has never been a

remake. According to one source, there have been several attempts, none of which have "seen the light of day." 

Perhaps Roger Ebert said it best in 1992 (the 50th anniversary of Casablanca): "There are great movies. More profound movies. Movies of greater artistic vision or artistic originality or political significance...But {it is} one of the movies we treasure the most...This is a movie that has transcended the ordinary categories."

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Spies & Sweethearts

She wants to do her part. He’s just trying to stay out of the stockade. Will two agents deep behind enemy lines find capture… or love?

1942. Emily Strealer is tired of being told what she can’t do. Wanting to prove herself to her older sisters and do her part for the war effort, the high school French teacher joins the OSS and trains to become a covert operative. And when she completes her training, she finds herself parachuting into occupied France with her instructor to send radio signals to the Resistance.

Major Gerard Lucas has always been a rogue. Transferring to the so-called “Office of Dirty Tricks” to escape a court-martial, he poses as a husband to one of his trainees on a dangerous secret mission. But when their cover is blown after only three weeks, he has to flee with the young schoolteacher to avoid Nazi arrest.

Running for their lives, Emily clings to her mentor’s military experience during the harrowing three-hundred-mile trek to neutral Switzerland. And while Gerard can’t bear the thought of his partner falling into German hands, their forged papers might not be enough to get them over the border.

Purchase Link: https://books2read.com/u/m0Od9l