Aug. 12, 2002 - 2:04 am
i'd been wanting to see this one since i saw Sergeant York (1941) last week. it's another of Howard Hawks' most famous films. it's on my National Film Registry list and is number 109 today on the IMDb top 250. only problem is it's film noir. which i hate. usually.
i don't think the plot is really worth explaining in this format. kind of just a mystery. the person who Humphrey Bogart is looking for is constantly changing throughout the film. quite a few people get killed, and the romance that the film pretends to contain is fleeting. basically it's like a James Bond picture. not that exciting and fairly forgettable.
this is my first Lauren Bacall film. she was excellent and very attractive in an eerie sort of way. sometimes i like Humphrey Bogart, sometimes not. i think i like him as long as he's not a detective. cause that just leads to crap film noir.
when i was watching the AFI 100 Years 100 Passions list on tv a month or so ago, i knew i had seen an awesome looking film starring the leads of this film, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. this film was obviously not that film. it was a weak attempt to mimic the huge success that film had had just a few years earlier. it turns out it was To Have and Have Not (1944). that film had also been directed by Howard Hawks and is the only film to have ever had two Nobel Prize winning authors associated with it. Ernest Hemingway wrote the novel, then William Faulkner did the screenplay. oh yeah. i have to see that one.
wow, i didn't realize it until i read the connection on the IMDb but The Big Lebowski (1998) is actually a spoof of this film. yeah you can really see it once you think about it.