Rosie Sayers and Charlie Allnut

Rosie Sayers and Charlie Allnut Solve the World’s Problems

These turbulent times. The tinder box globe ignites first here then there, unsteady calm is interrupted by flame throwers, pirates ride in high seas and parliaments, and all populations are furious at government swanking. There really isn’t any good new rock and roll, either.

So I ask myself what I’m missing when I look around. And find a general void of human challenge and ingenuity. A fist shaking at the impossible. Love and adventure being commonplace, flaming every heart.   Scott Carpenter, one of our first astronauts, hardly got a mention when he left us yesterday. A media populated by 30 year olds have no idea what bold adventure means. It is NOT the ‘Likes’ you got on Tuesday.

So I turned to The African Queen.

Katherine Hepburn is far from her most beautiful. She is arch and forbidding. She makes her character push you away. Humphrey Bogart plays a sack of a wasted ruffian whose shoulders are narrow, loose sailor’s pants sag on a flat, unmuscled behind, and he is more innocent Popeye than Casablanca’s smooth Rick. Neither star glistens with massage oils, hints of personal trainer’s biceps, perfect do’s, or sexy wardrobe. Yet they are riveting. You want to be with them. You want to know them. You want to bring them home. You love them.

Hollywood, once, long ago and far away, reflected the world it served, showed us simple heroism in daily gestures of bright good will that altered the course of every life for the better. Evil was recognized, responded to, battled. The enemies of decency were defeated. People with their hearts racing for more and more headed down wild waters without helmets. And that’s why Rosie Sayers and Charlie Allnut are such a thrill to watch because they were us, all we are, all we can be. 

I have a lot of favorite parts of  The African Queen.

The overall delight of watching two people literally transfigured by the actions they take is the real joy for me. It brings out the best in them. This very unlikely pair sure produce the best in each other. That’s what living a life and falling in love can do. Superb script by James Agee who knew a thing or two about living dangerously and getting drunk. And so did John Huston who directed it, from CS Forester’s novel.

Charlie Allnut has been tasked to rise above his usual getting-by nature (“Nature, Mr Allnut (replies Rosie) is what we are put on earth to overcome.”) and has gotten stinking drunk in response.

Charlie is just a happy boater in a lavish laze on his seaworthy African Queen stocked with cases of gin and thousands of cigarettes and an engine he knows and adores.

Rosie gets the idea to turn his boat into a sailing torpedo aimed at the enemy German battleship, The Louisa. It’s the right thing to do for their country in its time of need, the start of WW I. No matter that it takes the improbable shore-hugging craft down uncharted waters of ridiculously dangerous rapids headed for the enemy out there somewhere into the open seas. And oh, Charlie…. you have to invent the torpedoes from what’s on board and what the jungle has to offer, come on, you can do it. So he does. Charlie and Rosie have no advisers. Zero contact with the outside world.  No news of advancing or retreating armies. No looking for help from anyone. Only complete isolation and knowing what’s maybe possible if they live that long.

Charlie’s drunken song is one of the best parts of the movie for me. They also sing it when they’re afloat after The Louisa gets hit by the leisurely African Queen’s torpedoes find their mark, blowing the pair back to freedom moments before they’re hung by the German Navy that captured them. I don’t know who wrote the lyrics but they’re too too divine, impossibly dopey, and brilliant.  The African Queen is a true reality show. There are people out there doing heroic things who stand alone.  We’ve got us a better world than the dolled up fiction we get fed. Just wanted to remind us.

Something like “There was a bold fisherman went out to catch the piggy and it was a highly interesting song that he sang: Twinkie deedle dum Twinkie deedle dee….”

Oh, here’s the original tune sung by Bogie. You’ll love this.

(And a great website, Bogart Tributes, with more of same)

If you get the chance to read the original screenplay by James Agee, it is purely exquisite prose like most things that flowed from his pen. Apparently a huge challenge to the director, who, you can tell by comparing, did not follow all of Agee’s elegant detail. Hepburn wrote a book called something like How I Survived Making The African Queen. She says it was one hell of a rough go. Thanks, all of you. Nice job.

Casablanca VS Private Benjamin

The dangers of exhaustion, self-pity, and an eagerness to be rescued are no small dangers.

I’ve watched Casablanca a lot. I love it for it’s classy filmmaking, the wartime plot and easily hated enemies of life and romance; Ingrid Bergman’s beauty, and Humphrey Bogart’s skill in transitioning from a loveable, enterprising buffoon in African Queen to the height of handsome worldliness in Casablanca.

But over and over again I am struck by this: Holy shit, Ingrid! You got what you asked for.

It’s a guy’s dream movie, and up until the end, not bad for the girls. When Ilsa so memorably falls into Rick’s arms and says, “I can’t think anymore! You decide! You think for both of us!”  and Rick answers, “All right, I will!” we all melt. It’s ideal. Everything’s going to be all right.

On close inspection we see Rick’s wheels turning. Just how much does he want this young, bright, idealistic beauty in his life. How telling was it after all that he didn’t stay in Paris & risk his life to find her then. His drunken despair on parade when she reappears is Rick’s drama, Rick’s tribute to tortured love. It only lasts as far as the misty tarmac.

Whereupon Bogart forces Ingrid into the arms of a man who by description is Indiana Jones but in the flesh is a sexless aristocrat. Whoa!

What the writers did not do IN THE FINAL SCENE was put a gun into Ilsa’s right hand making the freedom fighting whosie get on the plane without her, leaving her left hand free to slap sense into Rick. And she’d have been some babe if she had done. Then maybe all us girls would have had a feisty adventuress for a role model, not some ultimate sop who trades her chance at an electrifying life for position and comfort in the arms of that unlikely safe man, and calls it honorable. She shows no outrage. She cries. She looks confused. She starts thinking Rick may be more trouble than he’s worth too, and this husband guy makes her look noble. Private Benjamin hadn’t been dreamed yet. Thanks, Goldie.

Being rescued has a lot of down sides, whether we long for it periodically or every minute of the day. Abandon the thought. Our own empirical experiences and resourcefulness are ultimately better on every level. It’s always good to have Paris but silly to suppose that once is enough for a lifetime.

The Maltese Falcon’s Americanism

I likely have watched this 50 times. It has a draw for me on several levels, and one, I realized last night, was the pervasive celebration of pure American individualism.

Dashiel Hammet picked up on and was of that. Huston lived it. Bogart honed it fine, starkly, devoid of distracting excess.

The movie is the observation of a man who operates in his own economy, independent of praise or the standards of convention, who is original, resourceful and therefore unafraid of what he might meet up in the pursuit of truth. And maybe most of all, Sam Spade is not a bystander in life.

His foils are consistent human foible personified, and they show up one by one in every new character: greed, duplicity, coyness, fear, obedience, cowardice,  self-indulgence, and casually murderous on behalf of all those choices. It is a modern Dante’s Inferno, and the hero is American.

Sam Spade dismisses deceptions thrown at him as quickly as a punch. He knows what comes from the turf, it is his turf on his terms. He’s got a trigger temper he controls, or uses to his advantage. He laughs at his own bravado, and doggedly stays on track. 

He is seduced if it serves his pleasure and purpose and cuts it loose if it interferes with his purpose and pleasure. He makes no unnecessary gestures on behalf of anyone. He lives his life, he is a fair man of principle, he is dangerous, he is kind, he is an opportunist, and he knows who he is, and who he is, is an American.

Sam Spade is all of us on all of our journeys, a demonstration of the way to get it done and not be taken down. When we see them depart one by one, everyone else in The Maltese Falcon already has or is destined to come to a bad end because of the lives they lead. Sam Spade is going to continue tomorrow and for the rest of his days to have the penultimate adventure of genuine experience. There isn’t anything to match it.

And THAT, not multi-million dollar mansions nor the abstract fantasy of power and control, nor envy, nor bitter stardom with its putrefying celebrity, is the American dream. The broad open untamed trail to individual experience. Still best found in America.