The Best of Bogart Collection (Warner, Blu-ray)
Humphrey Bogart was the first Hollywood star I ever embraced. Watching him hold down the center of Casablanca with a pose of populist existentialism covering his wounded romanticism (“Where were you last night?” “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.” “Will I see you tonight?” “I never make plans that far ahead.”), I thought he was the coolest cat I’d ever seen on the screen. A few years ago, Warner Home Video boxed up 24 Bogie films for the impressive DVD set Humphrey Bogart: The Essential Collection. Now they collect four of the definitive Bogart films previously released on Blu-ray for a smaller HD box set: the definitive Hollywood romance Casablanca (1942) and three films directed by John Huston, The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The African Queen (1951), which is a Sam Spiegel production and a Paramount release that Warner licensed for this set.
The Maltese Falcon, the directorial debut of stalwart screenwriter Huston and the film that made a star of Warner contract player Bogart, was the third adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel classic but the first to capture the hardboiled toughness of the novel and the vivid vipers nest of double-dealing thugs and con artists on the trail of a treasure like junkies chasing the ultimate fix. One-time Hollywood nice girl Mary Astor goes blonde, brazen, and absolutely ruthless as hard-hearted treasure hunter Brigid O’Shaughnessy who lies as easily as most people breathe, Sydney Greenstreet is the garrulous Kasper Gutman, keeper of the Falcon’s lore, Peter Lorre is the weaselly Joel Cairo, and Elisha Cook Jr. became a cult figure as the rat-faced gunsel and small-time thug Wilmer Cook. But it’s all built on Bogart’s incarnation of Sam Spade as the great hardboiled private detective, a mercenary with a code of ethics just slightly less vicious than characters he keeps company with. Like the man says, this film is the stuff dreams are made of, and it is the Bogart that Hollywood embraced and that America still loves: insolent, individualistic, a romantic under his hard-boiled hide. He played this character, in varying degrees, throughout the rest of his career, epitomized in his defining role as the wounded cynic in Casablanca. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Hollywood and Bogart.
Casablanca, the winner of three Oscars in 1943 (including Best Picture), placed second in the AFI’s poll to find the Best American Film of all time over 50 years later and is still one of the most beloved and popular Hollywood classics of all time. Humphrey Bogart proves that looks aren’t everything as the cinema’s most romantic existential hero and Ingrid Bergman is a vision of soft-focus loveliness as the emotionally wounded heroine. And they’re just the tip of this iceberg of Hollywood’s most supreme achievement in character casting: Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Dooley Wilson, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre are among the iconic faces in the exotic crowd. Michael Curtiz, the top director at Warner Bros. and one of the most versatile of his era, brings it all together with such perfection that it casts a spell across the decades. If you’ve seen it, you don’t need any more encouragement from me. If you haven’t seen it… why not?
John Huston gave Bogart many of his most interesting and challenging roles. The set features two of those: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston’s adaptation of B. Traven’s novel, and The African Queen, based on C.S. Forester’s novel. Huston is arguably the greatest Hollywood writer/director of literary adaptations and these are two of his greats. In Treasure, Bogart is a down-on-his-luck American who hits the lottery and heads out into the desert with a fellow hard-up American (Tim Holt) and an old sourdough prospector (Walter Huston, the director’s father) is a rugged, unglamorous look at the ravages of greed. The rugged, unglamorous look at the ravages of greed earned Oscars for father and son Huston (John for direction and screenplay, Walter for Supporting Actor) but not for Bogie, who to date had only been nominated once, for Casablanca and would wait until 1952 and The African Queen for his Oscar.
Set in Africa in World War I, The African Queen stars Bogart as a hard-drinking caption of a sputtering steam-powered boat and Katharine Hepburn as a spirited missionary who pushes him to strike back at the Germans who invaded their mission in German East Africa. It’s a classic journey adventure, with a series of obstacles that they meet with resilience and resourcefulness, but the story is how they move from “Mr. Allnut” and “Miss” to Charlie and Rosie, opposites who find strength, support and unexpected love in one another. Bogart and Hepburn stoke the fires of this unlikely romance the way only stars of that magnitude can. Huston shot the film (largely) on location in Africa and makes the location and The African Queen itself, with its big, clumsy, temperamental steam engine, essential parts of the film’s personality and texture.
All four films are have been beautifully remastered for Blu-ray—they are among the jewels in the crown of the Warner library and have been well cared for over the years—and each of the discs are (mostly) packed with supplements.
The Maltese Falcon features commentary by Bogart biographer Eric Lax, the featurette “The Maltese Falcon: One Magnificent Bird,” make-up tests, and three radio show adaptations featuring the movie’s original stars. Casablanca features separate commentary tracks by movie critic Roger Ebert and film historian Rudy Behlmer, the featurettes “You Must Remember This: The Making of Casablanca” and “As Time Goes By: The Children Remember,” five minutes of outtakes (see Bogie break character with an inspired expression), the premier episode of the 1955 “Casablanca” TV series, a radio adapatation with the stars, and the 1995 Looney Tunes cartoon homage “Carrotblanca.” The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has commentary by Eric Lax and the documentaries John Huston: The Man, the Movies, the Maverick and Discovering Treasure: The Story of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. All three include “Warner Night at the Movies” trailers, cartoons, and shorts, and other supplements. The African Queen, which is a Paramount disc, features a single supplements: the hour-long documentary “Embracing Chaos: Making The African Queen.” But it is also the only color film in the set and the restoration is stunning, flawless, as vivid as you can imagine. Jack Cardiff set the standard for Technicolor cinematography and it glows in this edition.
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