Humphrey Bogart - vo.rs

In a Lonely Place: Bogart's Most Frightening Role

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Humphrey Bogart plays a Hollywood screenwriter named Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place, and for the first twenty minutes you think you know the film. Washed-up talent, wisecracks sharper than the room deserves, a cynicism worn like a good coat. Then a young woman is murdered after leaving his apartment, Dix becomes the prime suspect, and the film begins to do something almost no noir of 1950 dared. It stops asking whether he did it and starts asking whether you would want to be in a room with him regardless. By the end, that second question is the only one that matters, and it is far more disturbing than any answer to the first.

The Big Sleep: The Plot Nobody Can Follow, and Why It Doesn't Matter

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

There is a story every film writer eventually tells about The Big Sleep, and it is true, which is the annoying part. During production in 1945, somebody on Howard Hawks’s set noticed that the screenplay never explained who had killed the Sternwood chauffeur, a man named Owen Taylor, whose car goes off the Lido pier early on. Hawks wired Raymond Chandler, whose 1939 novel the film was adapting, and asked him to settle it. Chandler, by his own later account, went back to the book and found that he did not know either. The murder had simply gone unaccounted for, and nobody making the film could reverse-engineer a culprit.