Real Between Curtains: John Huston and Bree Daniels, Gamblers (KLUTE, THE MALTESE FALCON)

Checking out The Maltese Falcon (1941) again--every time it's a different movie! Last time I wrote about it I saw it right after In a Lonely Place and was shocked by much that film's unflattering portrayal made Bogie and Astor each seem as monstrous and misshapen as Joel and the Fat Man. Mary Astor's twisted rococo hair styles made it scan like some Martian transmission from the bowels of one of my old-school delirium tremens. (see Bride of Bogartstein, Acidemic August 2011)

This time around, a slim three years later-ish, there was none of that but another facet, one equally rare in a noir or detective film: a concise expense account, i.e. money. The film is almost completely obsessed with it but not in a big brass ring way--though that is what the falcon represents--but also in a hundred dollar way - the money never gets lower than hundred denominations but even that is unique. It starts with the two hundred given to Miles Archer and Spade by Brigid O'Shaughnessy ("you gave us too much money if you'd been telling us the truth and enough too much to make it all right") and culminating in the envelope of ten thousand dollar bills with the delivery of the dingus. Spade gives the cops the thousand dollar bill (see title of this post), but pockets the rest at the end. After all, he has to keep the office running.

Paradoxically, if the money amounts were larger, they would be less relevant. It reminded me of the few times I ever did large (to me) drug deals, handing over five hundred dollars to a hippie on trust. There's an electric cord of adrenalin clear-headed focus associated with such sketchy large cash outlays that are completely unregulated by lawyers or bankers. When some big deal cokie brings a briefcase of thousands to a drug deal in a modern gangster film it seems to mean a lot less, refracting down to mere MacGuffin status by contrast --but in Falcon every hundred dollar bill has clout, it's power on a printed piece of paper. A C-note buys Spade's loyalty, to a point and it's never really clear whether he's just faking his lack of morals to solve his partner's murder or is just faking his faking when it becomes convenient. This is a movie where even we don't get to see the hero's cards. Dashiell Hammett's dialogue is always realistic in the sense that detective work is a business and, like a lawyer, a fastidious record of retainers, per diems, and expenses must be kept. After his second meeting with Brigid, Spade relieves her of another five hundred, compelling her to hock her jewelry; he then calls his lawyer when he gets back to the office and says into the phone, "I think I'm going to have to tell the coroner to go to blazes, Sid." He asks if he can hide behind his client's privacy, "what'll it cost me to be on the safe side?" another pause as Sid surely lays out an estimate (for what filing injunctions, paying off inquests? We never know). "Well, maybe it's worth it. Okay go ahead."

These kind of details reflect a savvy gambler's awareness of how money predominates discussions when no one is copping to their real motives or who they really are, i.e. in a game of poker. Money talks while bullshit walks as it does in gambling or with Brigid and Sam's love affair, who can say if either is really in love with the other? Who knows what the other guys are holding? In most films we're encouraged to forget we're watching actors play characters --we're not watching the truth. But not seeing the truth implies there is a truth, somewhere outside the frame - the truth is actors are making a film and you're watching it; but great movies like The Maltese Falcon call the idea that there is such a thing as truth at all into question.

A lot of film directors are gamblers by nature, borrowing money to try and break the bank, so they troll through the world collecting philosophies that help them deal with losing huge amounts of money, whether through a hand of poker or a roll of the critics' pens and the public's wallets. In Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Walter Huston's cracklin' pappy gold prospector and Tim Holt realize the entirety of a year's work on the mountain is lost in the Mexican desert wind as easily if shooting the works on a spin of the roulette wheel --and Holt is dejected but Pappy knows just what to do, laugh it up! God's joke on us! So laugh they do. And the fact that Holt is able to let go and shrug it off is the real 'treasure' he finds, for Pappy it's the nearby Mexican village where his rudimentary healing skills make him a hero. And in Maltese Falcon it's about being so good at bluffing, at seduction, at manipulation, that even we, your movie audience, don't know what you're holding. Hell, maybe even you don't. A busboy once told me how his wife was so good at reading tells in that he no longer even looked at his hand in Texas Hold 'Em, just took his chances. Now that's a deadpan gambler!

Not to be trite, but for real gamblers, like Huston, a fortune is something meant to be won and/or lost - its table stakes - the stakes get larger, the table grander- but it's still a game --and the measure of a man is how gracefully he can lose his skin on a toss of the dice, as per Huston's beloved Kipling. I know this poem of Rudyard's must be like holy gospel to old John H.:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!  

I've never been much of a gambler myself --if I win big I turn arrogant, if I lose big I turn ashen, my son. Kipling wouldn't have much use for me. I faint in desert heat and wither in the jungle and my wrists are too thin for my punches not to hurt my hand far worse than my opponent's chin. But if I was thicker skinned, say from a lifetime of adventure as a soldier and boxer like old John Huston, or if I could still drink whiskey like I could in my early twenties, I bet I'd go for gambling - why not? I don't think there's anything immoral about it - unless your children are starving because you lost their lunch money at the track. For me, just getting through the day without cracking up, winding up arrested or run over or in the hospital or fired or broken on the wheel, you get the point. But overall I ascribe to the Great McGonigle's 'never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump' philosophy--a good trimming can be as valuable as four years of NYU if the chump be naive enough to be trimmed. Casinos create valuable service industry jobs and remain meccas for performers. And what's a bigger stakes gamble than filmmaking? A few million dollars is considered a low risk gamble compared to the titanic bloated budgets of normal multiplex fodder. If gamblers didn't know how to laugh off catastrophic losses, Michael Cimino would have wound up wearing cement shoes after Heaven's Gate. Shit, son. He singlehandedly killed our once strong studio system! And he's still walking around... even making movies.

I also resonate with the gambler because I have addictions of my own, and knowing these I've been wary - casinos, like strip clubs, always seem very sad and suspicious to me, like pushy salesmen. The lap dance is okay to receive if part of some academic study, but I know if I surrender to its allure I'd wing up broke and pathetic within a matter of months and no closer to any kind of permanent fulfillment with a woman. Gambling too is okay for research and participation on some minor scale, to get a flavor for it so you can write about it later, but why When Sky Masterson laid down that line about sasparilla in one's ear I took it to heart. Casinos wouldn't even be in business if a right-brained scattershot like myself could beat them.

But beating them is not really the point: Every true gambler is always either rich or broke, it keeps them on an even-keel. Huston was like that, filling his unforgiving minute with guts and glory-- and part of what makes his films work is that few other directors convey such an accurate vision of what it is to be broke enough to understand the sign of class that is giving up your last cigarette to a near-stranger when you can't afford another pack, or the victory of getting a peso coin handout twice from the same American tourist, or quietly benefitting from the two day period involved in finding your partner's murderer to the tune of approx. seven hundred dollars:

Brigitte's initial retainer -         $200.
Brigitte's second cash outlay    $500.
Joel Cairo's 'small retainer' -     $200.
Less the lawyer fee for Sid to keep
her name out of it -- guestimate - ?? est. $200.
-TOTAL est $700!
--------------------
And solving two murders = priceless cred.

Lastly the thing that stuck with me this viewing was the impossibility of knowing whether or not Spade really loves Brigitte or is just a gent since he shagged her and any gent can feign being into a girl for at least 24 hours after shagging a broad. We get his clear-eyed list of all the things that would go wrong if he trusted her - "but look at the number of them!" - Love Bogie's eyes when he says "look" as if he's mentally really looking at the list and shuddering with withdrawal reptilian self disgust -- and on the other side

"Maybe you love me and maybe I love you"
"You know whether you love me or not!"
"Maybe I do."

Note that she doesn't even bother to wonder if her own feelings are real or if she's just scared to death because she too can visualize horror and reptilian self-disgust. Her tears fall so hot and fast you can see her whole persona begin to melt off even if her make-up never runs. She's an off and on again great actress, is Astor, which perfectly suits the material - not unlike Elizabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas or Jane Fonda in Klute - they convey the complexity of performance by in essence dissolving the metatextual difference between good actresses who are sexy by nature (as we well know based on her infamous journal) acting sexier to appeal to men but also trying to be sincere like all actors who value honest sincerity (probably as the result of acting teacher input) because as Mildred Plotka - once put it, regarding the "genuine" tragedy of realizing sincerity is impossible-- "we're not people, we're lithographs. We don't know anything about love unless it's written and rehearsed. We're only real in between curtains."

The triumph of Fonda's Bree is that though she doesn't really feel too attracted to Klute it's the very fact that he doesn't ask or need to be loved or adored that proposes the actorly challenge for her. It's his renouncement of any happiness for himself (including masochism or martyrdom) that ensures her winding up living in Bumfuck PA with this hangdog snoop will be like rehab, or prison, where one can no longer escape the fish bowl confessional that is finally looking at a too-long unregarded self. Such a choice seems like the last thing a girl of Bree's 'drinking wine in the dark and nursing a roach clip'-cool levels would find endurable. But she can at least realize that bored frustration is a unique paradise compared to the nonstop living in sexual twilight and feigning interest in unattractive guys. Klute demands no expression of even minimal interest on her part, and sees through all artifice as his job demands so it's sincerity or nothing, a bit like the court-ordered rehab worker who believes not a word his scamming patients say, he trusts only their urine.

This kind of endorsement can come verily close to being a pro-sexist post-code patriarchy soap opera sanctification of woman's 'choice' to be a barefoot pregnant servant of any man who'll marry her.  Man can't force her, but if she chooses to renounce her freedom then she is the only girl in town who will know true happiness. Looking at these kinds of films now can make one feel dirty - like our most cherished ideas of self-sacrifice were being exploited like we were goddamned Viridiana or Candy Christian. In the end, it may be prostitution, but there is one idea you can trust above all others --not steel, as it was for Conan, it's not even cash, it's that the best possible kind of secret agent doesn't even know he's an agent and that there is no discernible difference between a real person faking being in love and a fake person in love for real. In fact, at a certain halfway point they are indistinguishable -- if that's too harsh a truth then don't play poker, don't fall in love with your prostitute, and don't ever fuck with Roy Rogers' horse. Shit's POTENT, son. Love will not be trifled with, and we fake it at our own risk --but the payoff is all around us, choking the Earth with its relentless distracted appetites. One Tin Actress rides away... yeah, ride it.

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Bride of Bogartstein: IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)

Spousal abuse is so demonized these days that not a single redeeming characteristic is allowed to remain in our violent men of drama. Gone are the magnetic brutes like Stanley Kowalski, gone deep but abusive artists like Dix Steele in IN A LONELY PLACE (1950). It's not surprising then that we're unprepared for how hard it has become to adapt to these characters and their sudden brutal displays. We've become accustomed to not having to think about violent men in any way other than as cardboard action targets, as objects first for derision, then hate, then vengeance, and lastly more derision. No more can they seem sexy, or have good qualities.

But Bogart is Bogart, he could play a serial killer and we'd have to like him, and since he's playing a famous Hollywood screenwriter his tantrums and blinding rage white-outs (1) go unchecked save for police intervention which his studio then works to keep out of the papers. This is the kind of guy you should just get away from, the minute you meet him, but can't since he's famous, witty and charming in a bleak sort of way --he's Bogart! He's inescapable. His fist has a gravitic drag. Thus a brute is allowed to stay brutish as a side effect of his Hollywood success, when he should be in jail, or the ring: "I've had hundreds of fights," he says to Gloria Grahame as his concerned neighbor, as if that's some sort of mark of the martyr, some mark of courage.  Many other successful men in Hollywood must go through their whole adult life without throwing a real punch, especially with the proximity of lawyers never in doubt.

While Bogart looms like an electric golem gone to gray suits, Grahame flexes her beautiful face into a Hollywood glamor death mask as she tosses and turns in bed, worrying that she's sleeping with a raging egotist who could fly into a homicidal rage over the slightest thing she does wrong; this keeps her awake and she starts taking pills to sleep. He might not like that, so she worries more: "This one's not going to let you go that easy," snaps her masseuse, who it is implied has given her more than one happy ending over the years. Grahame's sad eyes show that for all his violence and bossiness, Dix is the last non-loser she's likely to run into before her happiness clock expires. But he's worse than a loser, he's a thug with an expensive tux and a case of the eternal shakes.

Bogart doesn't even allow us the comfort of falling back on his Bogart charm. Instead he lets himself get creepy, and his dark self-effacing wit seems strained. The Bogie we know is too sharp not to know when those around him are turned off, but Dix has no clue. Bogart is brave enough to show the angles by which even his actorly charisma can be exposed as vain antipathy. Even Dix's "A simple yes or no will do very well" proposal of marriage comes off like a threat. He sees marriage as providing any lady her luckiest break (or fracture) like signing a deal with a confused white tiger, or an arm-rending chimp, temporarily cute and calm but... really, the rest of your life with this thing? The only way out is to cultivate a penchant for servile masochism. As if to illustrate, Dix's battered agent exclaims to Gloria in the least coded of gay double entendres: "He's Dix Steel, and if you want him you've got to take it all" Rationalizing the hurt, he notes: "People like him can afford to be temperamental."

Any self-respecting woman would have left Dix the moment he first snapped, just as Krasner should have left Pollock when he made his first embarrassing scene at the dinner table. But such are those few unlucky moths that are so blind enough they can only see the most brilliant light, the light of charismatic madness, and so become stuck on the bulb of an ego that has swollen mercilessly with the pumping eternal handshake current of exploding pockets and the bloody war-like business of making pictures.

I'll admit the first few times watching IN A LONELY PLACE I got a headache, partially from the unpleasant frisson of seeing Bogart so messed up, but mainly from all those ringing phones! The road to Hollywood heaven must be paved with nonstop telephone calls. I guess in L.A. they are like music.  The best phone calls I ever had were from a girl in L.A. They went on for hours, for days! It's the very breathing of the biz, and you can tell Dix's never stops ringing. Ding Dong, indeed, the dead witches are in the making. The infernal bells are enough to drive anyone mad.

Director Nicholas Ray loved his insane abusive geniuses, and the link between Dixon and James Mason's tyrannical father in BIGGER THAN LIFE is clear: Hollywood is (or was) the place where white rage fights, shooting, drugs and casual sex are wantonly indulged in, thought about, and depicted for the enjoyment of the world. Certainly Ray indulged in these things, but his love makes him different than the poseurs of violence and despair. His forgiveness of his fucked up protags is his way, perhaps, of trying to forgive his own trespasses. Like Sal Mineo's tortured puppy killer in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, or Mason's most unsexy madness in BIGGER THAN LIFE, Bogart's illness has a groovy poetry. Both BIGGER and IN A LONELY PLACE show a man who thinks you are swooning at his brilliance and fearless spending instead of cringing in embarrassment.

Perhaps only natural bullies can make it in Hollywood, can climb the chain of intimidation. Or maybe all these are just excuses. Of course it would be damn nerve-wracking living with someone so violent, but Bogart was always a little menacing anyway, that's what gave his heroes their punch, the sudden eruptions, the "that means one of you is gonna get a beating for nothing!" climax of TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, or that cruel mirth in his eyes when he knocks out Joel Cairo in MALTESE FALCON.

I just gave some strange writerly advice to someone: "never give it your all unless your paid less than it's worth." Was that my dyslexia, or was this apparent paradox part of the sick queasy feeling created by seeing what financial overcompensation can do to a man like Dix Steele? When MALTESE FALCON followed LONELY PLACE on TCM (for Bogart Day), it seemed like a twisted freakshow out of Todd Browning; I've seen FALCON a trillion times but suddenly the camera angles seemed beyond bizarre. Long takes of nothing: a phone gradually reached for and talked into offscreen; a phone on the night table, the lit cigarette. I finally realized I should be wondering if Bogie's in bed with Mrs. Archer, or alone reading a racing form. When we finally see him again it's from low angles, looming around big hotel lobbies or taking his maternal support on the sly from Effie. He's a terrifying bully, all of a sudden, just from the proximity to Ray's film on the TCM schedule.

In other words, Bogart seen after IN A LONELY PLACE is a monster no matter who he's playing. He's a Universal horror monster figure who escaped to Warner's to be a gangster and then rampaged his way up to stardom and romantic protagonists. He and his first wife were known as "the battling Bogarts." This was never a man to fuck with. Such a man is maybe too quick to violence even in WW2 approved locales, but Ray is able to locate the monster underneath all the heroism and the sweet poet soul underneath the monster. Once the war is over and there's no one left to legally kill, the monster in the Bogart persona starts to crack through the detective/war hero/romantic lead mask, right along the crow's feet, and his dormant Frankenstein monster starts trying to reach out to crush someone.

The fourth time through PLACE, gone was my headache over the phones, and to the floor was my jaw at the sheer intense brilliance of Bogart's slow burns and sudden lashings. When something doesn't go his way, the anger begins, and then every attempt to quiet him is regarded through progressively more paranoid eyes. In the end the murder mystery is solved and yet Dix has almost started a whole new one. Dix's ego is such that he shouldn't be allowed to be in a movie, any movie, but Nicholas Ray never gives up on any character, even when they're so foul we recoil in shock that we're seeing them at all, let alone as protagonists. His love for dangerous maniacs is contagious; their lives are his downfall, and our redemption.

NOTES: 1. I had a rage white-out once, and I can tell you it's exactly what it sounds like - you literally go blind; a kind of dissolving white noise signal clouds your vision, and you start lumbering towards your prey like a drunk Frankenstein.

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Exit Visas from Paradise

One thing marvelous about the secret language of Hollywood's 'production code' is the way poetic/romantic dialogue invariably packs a subversive undercurrent - hip screenwriters compelled to bury layers of dirty innuendo beneath shallow graves of poesy. When it's done right, the code--such as it is--works well, as children and adults end up seeing two completely different movies.

Watching CASABLANCA (1941) for the millionth time last night, for example, I noticed deep currents of sexual bartering in the dialogue that just weren't there before. I realized the film is now--for me-- completely different than it was back when I taped it at 15 and watched it incessantly. Back then it was a tale of witty rapport between Bogie and Raines, some Nazi action, thrilling music, some draggy romance redeemed by Bogie's toughness. My old teenage-days film making partner Aland and I studied Bogie's every move - this was how we wanted to be when--if--we ever had dates of our own.

Now, countless dates and viewings later, I find the whole enterprise much richer, dirtier and more cynical. I'm presuming you've seen it, so forgive spoilers: Let's start off with Bogart's embittered reunion with Ilsa after she sneaks back to see him after her first visit to Rick's American with her husband, Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid), seeking the letters of transit (she leaves Victor asleep back at the hotel). She tells Rick how important it is she gets the letters of transit, how hard it's been for her since they parted, etc., to which he coldly mentions hearing similar sob stories 'before, with a tinny piano playing downstairs,' a remark so cruel it shoos her off .

It wasn't until this most recent viewing that it dawned on me: the 'tinny piano downstairs' is an allusion to a brothel, where the women hang out and drink cocktails with the potential clients in a downstairs lounge with a piano player, before luring a man upstairs for sex and maybe post-coital sob stories the women might tell--poor moms overdue on their rent, etc.--in order to maybe dig a larger amount of francs from the pockets of their homesick clientele. Bogart's indication that he's heard stories similar to Ilsa's with the tinny piano playing downstairs suddenly has sleazy meaning that no child would ever discern, at least I never did. Now, of course, brothels are far less commonplace. I've never been to one, but by now I've seen enough Godard movies to know they existed... in Paris... where Bogart lived before the Nazi invasion.

This ties in with the overall sleaziness on coded display in Casablanca itself, namely the exchange of sex for exit visas courtesy the womanizing Captain Renault (Claude Raines). He makes this offer to a young Bulgarian refugee, whose young dumb but handsome husband is trying to win the money needed at roulette in Rick's back room. Rick foils this plan by letting him win, to which Renault is only mildly disappointed (I'll be in tomorrow with a beautiful blonde, and it will make me very happy if she loses.")

I kind of gleaned this coded transaction as a youngster, but in this latest viewing, such transactions seemed the life blood of the film, and serve all the better to sketch out the sleazy rubric so popular in pre-code women's pictures -- the "How far would you go to save your husband?" theme, explored in films as old as TEN CENTS A DANCE (1931) and BLONDE VENUS (1931), right up to JEOPARDY (1953) and 1993's INDECENT PROPOSAL. The popularity of these pictures seemed to stem from the need to find scenarios where it became heroic, noble to cheat on your husband, thus allowing bored dreamer housewives to have their socially verboten kuchen and eat it too. If a woman would only cheat on her husband to save his life, well, then Hollywood scenarists would find hundreds of occasions, as if all of life was one compromising situation after another. Lazlo's issue is no different than Herbert Marshall's radiation poisoning in BLONDE VENUS, or Barry Sullivan's being stuck under a fallen beam as the tide rolls over him in JEOPARDY. Another even sleazier unspoken coded concept--rather unique to CASABLANCA--is the indirect conversation between Ilsa and Lazlo where she basically gets advance permission from her husband to sleep with Rick, if necessary, in order to secure their exit visas. Now that is seriously European of him! One can't help but be impressed by the gracious way he acknowledges the 'what went on in your bed while I was in a concentration camp stays in Vegas" credo.

It's to Henreid's credit as an actor that he makes this mcguffin-hungry anti-Nazi activist such an innocuous tool that he also 'deserves' to be cuckolded. I'd say that 'deserving' is linked, though not spelled out, via the scene where  Lazlo insists the orchestra play the French national anthem which interrupts the drunk singing of the German soldiers. First of all, it's rude, and naturally going to have bad repercussions for Rick's cafe, ending the party thanks to Major Strasse's (Conrad Veidt) outrage. In fact, Lazlo's presence contributes directly to Rick's loss of status as someone everybody knows and respects in Casablanca. Lazlo reduces him to a man without a bar--at least temporarily-- all for a few moments of French "we conquered these Arabs first, so fuck you" pride. Why is it noble for France to sing their anthem in Morocco? Aren't they just there first, but nonetheless conquerors? Better the French nationals should realize the humiliating sting of occupation and ask the locals, 'hey, what's the Moroccan national anthem, why don't we sing that?" Thus Rick pays the price for Victor's pride, so it's only fair Rick should steal Lazlo's woman. All this is of course spelled out only parametrically in soft dialogue about how 'for your sake, I let her pretend.'

Then of course there's the oft-discussed 'two-second light tower' dissolve, which I wrote about in relation to BABY DOLL (here) and which Maltby wrote about and Zizek analyzes. 

Another observation this go-round was how CASABLANCA strikes a particularly melancholy/happy note of a paradise where no one knows what they got until they lose it. We hear Casablanca is a rough place in the opening narration, but what we mainly see is a bar full of people having a good time, and not knowing how great they have it as they bitterly struggle to escape. The Casablanca of Rick's American is a pre-Edenic paradise, reminding me of that magical realist masterpiece of the 1980s, LOCAL HERO, in which Peter Riegert plays an oil man sent to buy out a remote Scottish seaside village in preparation for a massive oil refinery. it's citizens are anxious to sell out and get away while Riegert soon realizes they don't know how good they have it at this magical locale, and how sad it will be when it's all wiped away.

 

The town of Casablanca is, in Curtiz' film, depicted as just a great a place to be, a giant playground sandbox costume party. Everyone is dressed up as somebody else, and make no attempt to at an Arab accent as they wear an array of fezzes and costumes culled from all corners of the Warner costume dept. European ex-pat actors, legitimate refugees from the Nazis in the 1930s, such as, for example,  vehement anti-Nazi (he emigrated his native Germany in 1933) Conrad Veidt (read my appreciation of his work in A WOMAN'S FACE here) play Nazis. As a locale--both Hollywood and Morocco--are filled with refugees from all over the world, and the actual Arab locals of Morocco are almost nowhere to be found.

In short, it's a paradise of eternal play, disguise and joy, all enabled by what Todd McGowan (1) would call an absence of the imperative to enjoy, thus creating real enjoyment. Because Casablanca is supposed to be a hell hole, the people are free to enjoy without anxiety about the presence of the big other. Zizek compares this to life under communism where since the command to enjoy wasn't present, the people were free to enjoy as an act of covert rebellion discreetly sanctioned by the state as a kind of necessary evil. When you know just who and where the 'Big Other' is, you feel almost safer, more free to enjoy than you would in an enjoyment-centered society where a definitive Other is externally absent - so becomes internalized as the stifling imperative to enjoy.  Because everyone is supposed to be miserable and trying to get to Lisbon and freedom, there is no pressure to have fun and the vibe becomes one of existential despair, which in turn allows joy to form the way it only truly does: when one is staring mortality and loss directly in the face, like the brave blokes of the THE DAWN PATROL (1938).

Of course part of the appeal, the precious moment-in-time beauty of the cafe, stems from Rick's aloof cynicism, and also the cynicism and desperation of the refugees. A triple ex-pat, Rick fled to Spain to escape American persecution for some unnamed crime, fought for the anti-fascists and then fled to France, then escaped to North Africa right before the German invasion of Paris; now he's basically at the end of the rope, protected by international law and the help of Louie (Rains), the prefect of police. In short, he's like a kid who is free from worry, and yet, or because, is a virtual prisoner (the town itself has a curfew, as if it was populated by teenagers). The arrival of Ilsa signifies not just a chance to redo the past, but to leave the perpetual adolescence of this purgatory town and move forward--ala Stanley Cavell's comedies of remarriage.

On the other hand, why bother? At the famous plane climax I felt a sense of recognition, like I was Rick, and Ilsa and Victor were all my friends my same age who went off to Westchester to wed and raise children while I stayed in the East Village and romanced a beautiful rich, already married, Parisian businesswomen, and ended up with nothing, not even a Renault (2), yet still... for all that, content. In short, Rick's staying in Casablanca and heading off to join the Free French is a heroic rejection of adulthood's sticky reproductive flytrap - his bar sold, he follows the adage of Pavement's Stephen Malkmis: "Between here or there is better than either here or there!"

Finally recognizing 'this is the place and time' to shed his neutrality on the Nazi issue and cut the last remaining cord that ties him to th natural process of aging -- signified by the plane to Lisbon "and then America" -- Rick chooses his side once again. Let the balm of war--the only true cure for lovesickness--begin! Rick is staying put in the only place where paradise may truly endure, the deepest womb of hell, where people go to escape their past, the Free French Foreign Legion... like Geoffrey in UNDER THE VOLCANO, it's his natural habitat - "and that makes Ricky a citizen of the world!"

1) McGowan's Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment informs this essay and comes highly recommended. 
2) She did buy me a very nice video projector for Xmas one year

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Coolest Couples #3: Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart

Bogey - a man of contradictions, perhaps more like the no-bullshit tolerating screenwriter of IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) than some would like. Bacall - plucked from the fashion model ranks by Howard Hawks' classy wife and brought to Hollywood for a screen test, contract and lessons in classiness. She was 19 and Bogie 45 when they starred in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) and fell in love, a romance allowed to bloom under the Hawks' watchful, nurturing eye. Hawks had his own yen for her but was no fool about it. Eternal lightning in a bottle movie magic had priority over his petty desires. True artists understand this. Hawks is a true artist.

I love Howard Hawks so much that I wont even read his biography. If I read he wasn't as wondrous and nice a spiritual father as I imagine, I might lose some of my admiration and I would be lost. But even Joan Crawford deserves to have her films evaluated purely on their own merit, and so Bogey and Bacall need to be judged, purely on their amazing chemistry in Hawks' two films with them: THE BIG SLEEP and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, for in some ways they were his couple. Their non-Hawks films together - DARK PASSAGE, KEY LARGO, are okay movies, but aren't really in the same league. They're movies with Bogie and Bacall in them, and someone trying and failing to get what Hawks got out of them. Hawks' camera is the third wheel all third wheels aspire to be.

Poor Bogart died rather early on in Bacall's life and perhaps that's how all May-December romances should end: the elder member dying before becoming old and unsexy.  As our country gets more and more repressive and ageist, it's important to remember that May-December romances are awesome if they don't drag on too long, and both parties are in their right mind. Unusually  intelligent and soulful men in their forties and girls in their early 20s have a lot in common: they both want to face death more than they care about safe boring normalcy. Sensitive women in their 40s and boys in their 20s have a similar bond only in reverse: complete disillusionment and resentment towards the status quo, life's cold-hearted casino dealer on the endless boulevard of broken lights. Men mature later than girls, and don't have to deal with menopause. Early 20s girls don't have to deal with the anxieties of having kids or fretting over the biological hourglass running out. They do have to deal with immature boys more anxious to huff solvents and play air guitar hero than fund vacations or co-create stable family environments or plumb emotional depth connections. The 40-something men are dealing with wives that have stripped off sex like a wet burlap dress and slipped into fresh-from-the-drier mommy pants right as they--the men--are just beginning to have any sort of sexual self-confidence. 

When they met, Bogey was married to a drunken jealous psycho named Mayo Methot and lacked the wherewithal to do much about it except match her drink for drink, nickname her "Sluggy" and just do his best to not get shot in the face.

Bacall meanwhile was 19 and practicing lowering her speaking voice under Hawks' tutelage. As Hawks later said, "Bogie fell in love with the character she played and she had to go right on playing it for the rest of their marriage." See, right there I could almost get disillusioned. I read that in HAWKS ON HAWKS and it was enough for me. Enough to know he's a bit of a cynic. I got to walk away right there.

In the 1940s we should remember, marriage was tough to escape and sex was still a commodity; giving it up before marriage required either an engagement ring, diamond bracelet or double the amount of alcohol it takes now. Unless of course you were already divorced or widowed. Consider the times and realize that this couple had the chips cast against them: an ex-wife that used to show up at parties with pistols, their own age differences, cancer, gossip. Yet that stuff just makes it all the more romantic. The tales of how he would walk alongside the road and Bacall would stop to pick him up for brief hand-holding car get-aways is familiar to me through my own past indiscretions and I can assure you it just makes it super-hot for it to be so wrong. I thought a lot about Bogie and Bacall during that whole period in my life; they were my road map, my validation, like WC Fields had been before I sobered.

The sad part of it all is of course Bogey's cancer in 1957. On the other hand, they went to Africa to film THE AFRICAN QUEEN before that. I love that Bacall tagged along for moral support, hanging out in the wilds of the jungle, smoking and reading Hemingway (I'm guessing) and making sure cocktail hour was scintillating as it could be with so many bugs around. As for Bogart's three-pack-a-day unfiltered Camel-related cancer, well, we all got to go sometime, and sometimes getting out while you can still get it up is pretty good. Bogey never had to get old and crotchety and watch her take off with Frank Sinatra (who almost married her and took over Bogey's "rat pack" chairman of the board role after his death) or the pool boy. He never had to go all Mr. Chatterly.

I also love that Bacall and Bogart led a staunch anti-blacklist crusade, daring to step up and shout down the ravings of that alcoholic paranoid Joseph McCarthy (above). Later he kind of back-pedaled, but could you honestly say you knew black from white or red from green in that business?

But so what? In a way, Hawks was something like the Dog Whisperer, in telling his characters what he needed from them he also gave his actors a way to live. The codes of ethics these people have is clear-cut, admirable, and yet leaves room for plenty of improvisation, drinks, cigarettes, sex and fun.  The censors even let Hawks get away with stuff they'd never let pass in other directors' films, because, as Hawks says: "they liked my pictures." And you can see why: Hawks' characters operate on much higher principles than even the censors would hope for in cinema. His principles are high enough that he can kick aside conventional morality and its gossipy, sexually-frustrated parameters like a card table at a saloon-side brawl, and no one's going to dare say a word about it.  No amount of money or danger, pain or pressure, can stop a Hawksian hero from doing what he feels is right: he wants his women to know there are no strings attached to him, and he wants them the same way, even if he has to unearth all their darkest family secrets before rolling the hay bones. We can also find this level of ethics in the novels of Raymond Chandler, which is why THE BIG SLEEP was such a good fit all around:

Ms. Rutledge: Why are you doing this?
Marlowe: Maybe I'm in love with you, too.
Mrs. Rutledge: You know whether you're in love with me or not.
Bogart: Maybe I do. 

Baby, he did. More than 50 years after his death, Bogart is still going strong, a benchmark of masculine honor that all men still turn to for dating advice, like Woody Allen in HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU KID. Bacall is still going strong, on Broadway and in gutsy films like DOGVILLE.  She went on to marry and divorce no less a coolio than Jason Robards. But of course, you can feel the spirit of Bogey still coursing through her being. If she had to stay in character all through their marriage, let's not forget he stayed in character as well, and has continued to do so even from the grave. He's more than an actor to those who love him, he's the wellspring from which much of what is cool today flows -- Jean Paul Belmondo mirroring his HARDER THEY FALL lobby card in BREATHLESS or Sinatra's own reinterpretation in his re-imagined post-war tough guy persona (pre-war let's not forget, Sinatra was a beanpole crooner from Hoboken who'd show up on Jack Benny and suffer through being regularly blown away by strong winds or auditioning for the role of a broom handle. Bogie surely had a hand in inspiring his later tough guy image).

On a personal note, when I went through some rough single in the city stretches in the mid 90s, my friend Max instructed me to adopt the mantra: "Be like Bogey... be like the Bogey," which wasn't some sleazy bit of base-running advice, it was a deeply honorable and resonant way to not lose track of who I was while waiting for some chick to call me back. A whole wealth of soul-grooming advice is packed into the word Bogey: it means "become a self-sustaining honorable tough but compassionate, sarcastic but loving, wise but fearless, unflinching but sensitive hero who doesn't live and die by whether or not some broad calls him back, and so they always do."

All I ever have to remember when I'm losing my shit is: "be like Bogey," my rudders are magically righted. There'll only ever be one Bogey and Bacall, but their love was our love, they had enough to share, and in sharing they helped a nation dealing with war and noir disillusionment refashion their sense of self in such a way as to allow numerous antithetical attitudes to exist simultaneously. They were two toughs who loved each other with a love that mixed attraction and respect in equal measure and they could soften around each other yet be twice as tough at the same time. Just look at the above pictures. Whenever or not they're gazing into each other's eyes, you can feel, even in the photos, their love - even when neither is smiling. Audiences felt and feel it too then and today. Even today those two movies they made with Hawks give us hope, confidence, trust, a renewed sense of honor, and a need to smoke and tell the truth, whatever the consequences.

If modernism is the cause of stripping away arts' illusion to reveal death too suddenly and in disguise to allow our brain to mask it, if only for a second, then Bogey was the man for whom it was never masked at all --he like few others saw it clearly and recognized it without flinching or blaming or bargaining. Being on LSD can be like that too, which is why Bogey's films were so popular at 60's-80's college campuses. Bogey helped you navigate your way out of bad trips. As Bazin and Truffaut wrote in Cahiers du Cinema, Bogey was, I paraphrase, a walking corpse who's smile was the smile of death, of laughing at it even as it eats you. Bazin goes on to say Bogey represented "the immanence of death, its imminence as well."

Here's lookin' at you, kid.
And hurrah for the next who dies.
And sometimes...

Sometimes you're just a stinker. 

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