|
The war is far away yet felt closely, nothing says fascism like an agent on your tail for a quip about a flag. Martinique after the fall of France, rebels in Vichy territory, the American skipper (Humphrey Bogart) has other fish to fry. "By the way, what are your sympathies?" "Minding my own business." His tippling deck hand (Walter Brennan) must be roused with a bucketful of seawater, his surly client (Walter Sande) has the sin of carelessness. The alluring nomad (Lauren Bacall) makes his acquaintance by asking for a smoke, later on she squirms mildly as they take cover from a hail of bullets: "I think I'm sitting on somebody's cigarette." Howard Hawks' overhaul of Hemingway is also a knowing transposition of Carné and Duvivier, Gallic doom converted into Yank insouciance. The individualist's grudging sail into commitment, the Queen Conch charted for the Resistance. "You save France. I want to save my boat." Rigorous casualness eschews patriotic piety, the main concern about the wounded freedom fighter (Walter Surovy) is that he may bleed on the cruiser's cushion, his wife (Dolores Moran) is "another screwy dame" to deal with. Far more important is the spectacle of two actors palpably falling in love in front of the camera, of adolescent nervousness peeking through Bacall's sultry worldliness and of Bogart's signature stubble getting in the way of their kiss. "Why don't you shave, and we'll try it again." "The right lyric" sought and found, a background drummer reading a newspaper while waiting for his cue and a tracking shot across a smoky saloon perfectly timed to a silhouetted clarinetist in the foreground. (Hoagy Carmichael at the piano is forever ready to jauntily fill the silence after a shootout, and to tickle the ivories with sarcastic sentimentality following a stinker's demise.) Brennan's bee query adduces a joking note from Valéry, the splendid climax of the pistol in the drawer moves to a shimmying coda. Curtiz has the official remake (The Breaking Point), Lester the unofficial one (Cuba). With Marcel Dalio, Dan Seymour, Sheldon Leonard, and Aldo Nadi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |