Friday's Old Fashioned: Sahara (1943)

In Stefan Kanfer’s book “Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart,” he notes the actor dismissing his 1943 “Sahara” as one nobody remembered. Bogart’s theory of this run-of-the-mill product seemed to stem from his playing a hero rather than a heavy. But the movie’s transience comes across more indebted to the fact that Bogart does not have much of anything to play to, and that he does not have anything to play to because the movie was specifically designed to exist only unto its exact moment in time, an effort to drum up support for WWII, its purpose expiring roughly on about V-J Day. True, the movie only has one real flag-waver of a speech, unfurled near the end, but it evangelizes plenty for the armed forces nonetheless. When Sgt. Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) is asked where he’s from, he replies, “No place, just the army,” just as he continually refers to the M3 Lee tank he commands as “Lulabelle,” frequently describing her – I mean, it – in terms of a “dame.” Regardless of WWII’s necessity, regardless of any war’s necessity, you have to admire the jingoistic fluid drip hooked up by director Zoltan Korda, the way he renders the army as the only family a man needs and the tank he fights in as the only companion. In this light, it even sorta makes sense that the too-old Bogey would, in fact, not be too old for the army at all; spiritually, he’s a lifer. His name is Joe Gunn, but he’s really Uncle Sam in Joe Gunn’s clothing.

Taking place exclusively in the African desert after the fall of Tobruk, Gunn and his tank crew become separated from the rest of their unit and steer south across the Libyan desert in the hopes of reuniting. Along the way, several other characters enter the fold, like a Sudanese General and his Italian prisoner, a British Army medical officer and a French corporal. After shooting down a German plane, they wind up with a Luftwaffe pilot prisoner too. It’s nothing less than an African Theatre tableau, allowing for these unlikely allies and enemies to mix and match, to quarrel and come together. Not that we don’t know for one moment who’s in charge. When Captain Halliday (Richard Aherne), the British officer, and Gunn have a disagreement, Halliday resists the urging of his fellow English soldiers along for the voyage across the sand to keep at it and backs off, citing confidence in Gunn’s commanding ability. If it strangely fails to maximize potential drama, it is also a moment you can imagine American audiences of the time cheering along to. It’s important to work together, yes, but only so long as everyone is united in taking orders from us. (On the other hand, maybe it was just because Bogart’s name came first on the poster.)

Gunn is, however, convinced to have a change of heart after he cuts the Italian POW, Giuseppe (J. Carrol Naish), lose to conserve water, condemning his foes to death in the desert. As the tanks roll away, though, Bogart gets that damn it all to hell grimace as Gunn orders the tank back. And that Giuseppe turns out to be sympathetic, in a moving mid-movie monologue decrying Mussolini and what he and his fellow Italians were to made to fight for, Gunn’s humanity is rewarded. Even the Germans, the vile Germans, are afforded a measure of dignity in so much as Captain Halliday observes they have not been afforded the dignity of freedom in the first place, a reminder that freedom is what’s at stake overall. In moments such as these, the music swells and your heart rises, or it’s meant to anyway, to leave the theater and go put some money into war bonds. There is another moment though when the makeshift crew, deep in the desert and thirsty, is forced to ration water in a canteen to three sips each. Gunn watches each man closely, making sure he sticks to his mandated amount. Throughout this sequence no music swells. It is just the quiet of the desert and the hollow rattle of the canteen. It’s the one moment that imparts that other important lesson about war: it’s hell.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Battle Circus (1953)

“Battle Circus” takes its title from a MASH unit during the Korean War overseen by Chief Surgeon Jed Webbe (Humphrey Bogart), which is frequently on the move due to enemy movements, forced to roll up its tents, gather its considerable supplies, round up its myriad patients, trek to a new location, get re-settled there and then one, two, three, four days later do it all over again, just like the circus. That also, however, suggests a certain amount of fun, macabre or otherwise, a la Robert Altman’s famed 1970 film, “MASH”, and the beloved television series that followed in its footsteps. And though there are glimmers of such fun, particularly in an early scene inside the nurse’s tent where Lt. Ruth McCara (June Allyson) gets to know everyone, “Battle Circus”, directed by Richard Brooks, does not evince a humorously macabre air so much as one that wavers, oddly, between plain macabre and sweet, a dark-hearted docudrama and a romantic comedy, the waffling tone epitomized in the dueling lead performances of Allyson and Bogart.

TCM indicates that Allyson took the role to help shed her so-called Girl Next Door image. Yet she is introduced blundering into harm’s way and then resisting the overtures of Webbe, adherent to a strict moral code that feels suspiciously like a Girl Next Door. What’s more, her chemistry with Bogart is all wrong. His character spends most of his time making passes at her, drunken or otherwise, which is not played by Bogart as “it was different time” indecorum, like some oafish sitcom character, but real edge at decided odds with Allyson’s innocence, making him seem like a lecherous predator, which Bogart’s leering smile suggests was intentional. This is well done, in its unsettling way, and in need of a more iron-willed co-star for bawdy give and take, while their occasional comical encounters feel cut and pasted from a different movie entirely.

A comedy “Battle Circus” mostly isn’t, particularly in scenes of surgery, which Brooks films with maximum gravitas, not simply to demonstrate Webbe’s ability to curtail his drinking when a patient’s life in his hands but to give us a true glimpse of wartime triage. Here you can sense an alternate movie that Brooks might have yearned for, with no comedy whatsoever, just war and what it does to those who go through it. There is a sequence inside the medical tent where a Korean prisoner, mentally undone by the noise of the operating room, filmed in a series of quick cuts making clear this unraveling, leaps from the table, gets hold of a grenade and threatens to send the whole place sky high. He’s talked down by Ruth, suggesting it’s a sequence to lend her character a sense of heroism, though it’s more notable for the atmospheric terror it engenders, essentially stripping these ostensible enemies of that classification and rendering them equally desperate.

A scene in which Webbe overrules the Camp Commander and performs an all-night open-heart surgery, the hours and manpower required be damned, evokes not simply the toll of operation but the weariness of war itself, which is burning out Webbe and which suitably manifests itself in both his drunkenness and lecherousness. At one point his character is made to lament the possibility of the Korean War becoming the third World War, an interesting line that puts into perspective how this movie must have felt in its time, released into the era of the war itself. That release date, however, also seems to portend the movie’s conclusion as Webbe, with Ruth’s aid, gives up the bottle and eventually guides his Battle Circus to safety through a war zone, something less than the fog of war and more like the battlefield as inspirational grounds for becoming a new man. Uncle Sam gives it two thumbs up.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Harder They Fall (1956)

In the world of boxing, the word “bum” has long had an unfortunate connotation, usually employed to deride a pugilist’s in-ring skill or commitment to the fight game, much like Mickey Goldmill deemed Rocky Balboa a bum. In “The Harder They Fall”, however, the term “bum” acquires even more sinister meaning. Indeed, in the case of Argentine boxer Toro Moreno (Mike Lane) the term bum is more evocative of the boxer’s role less as any kind of actual boxer than a performer, one whose entire career is a fabrication invented by fight promoter Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) and sportswriter Eddie Willis (Humphrey Bogart), taking the desultory job merely because his newspaper has gone under and he needs money. They deem Moreno The Wild Man of the Andes, invent victories he never attained that no eyewitnesses can vouch for, and schedule him fights that are all fixed, determined to keep the ruse going until Toro is fighting for the heavyweight championship, making them all rich along the way. The slugger’s professional helplessness is best evinced in a shot where Toro is seated, just his head visible in the bottom corner of the left hand side of the frame, as Eddie and Nick and their various hangers-on argue and discuss Toro's future, what they want him to do and how they will go about having him do it. Toro has nothing to say; he is at their mercy; he is a bum.

The finer points of boxing are never discussed, and the violence in the ring is presented as being completely phony, totally real, and all part of the show. Huge and lumbering, Toro’s fights are laughable affairs where he doesn’t do much more than bop opponents on top of the head. Yet when a man who has already been knocked senseless by the heavyweight champ meets Toro in the ring, a few meaningless taps to the head trigger the man’s skull inadvertently trigger his ultimate demise. Still, Toro is given “credit” for the death in the press, which upsets the heavyweight champ, who seeks Eddie out to explain that he, not Toro, should be called the killer. It is evocative of Ron Howard’s “Cinderella Man” using the death Max Baer caused in the ring in real life, and in real life felt guilty about, simply as a means to paint the pugilist as some sort of man-killing monster. But if Howard used it un-ironically, in “Cinderella Man” director Mark Robson was cosmically calling Howard on the carpet 49 years in advance.

Lane’s performance as Toro is serviceable in just the right ways, out of his element and in over his head without ever realizing it, as if he’s a professional wrestler who even in the ring fails to grasp that the whole thing is fake. That’s why when Toro realizes everything is rigged and enters the ring in the climactic bout against the heavyweight champ, the moment is absent any kind of heroism because you know he’s getting his clock cleaned. It’s not Ali leaning on the ropes against Foreman; it’s Ali taking a battering against Holmes for no other reason than misplaced pride. It hurts. It hurts Eddie too, who only takes this desultory job because his newspaper has gone under and he needs a little financial security.

That fatalistic air was nothing new to Bogey and he gives that unrivaled weary cynicism another exemplary workout here. In his introductory scene, where the plan is pitched to his character, Bogey does that thing he often did, that sort of faux-pacing, a couple steps this way, a couple steps that way, all while rubbing his ear and getting the look of a man who has encountered a flooded road and is deciding whether or not to try and drive through it even though he already knows he will. And sure enough, when the car winds up stuck in the water, he doesn’t panic nor bemoan his misfortune but examine his options for cutting his losses. As such, even when Eddie knows Toro is doomed, he cannot help but council the boxer to get in there anyway, as if getting paid will remedy everything. Yet when he learns Toro is not getting paid, at least not as much as he should, Eddie boils over in an exquisitely framed scene where Nick and his yes-men wine and dine, indifferent to the raging humanity of Eddie behind them.

In his own way, the character becomes a kind of pugilist, forced into the corner, fighting for his life. Even as he is, however, one punch remains. He might be a writer, but all throughout “The Harder They Fall” we never see him write, not until the end. Forced into the corner, he rears back and with a typewriter and a front page, evoking his “Deadline — USA” (1952), pulls himself off the metaphorical ropes and throws one last knockout.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Deadline – U.S.A. (1952)

“Deadline – U.S.A.” is, first and foremost, a Humphrey Bogart picture, what when considering that his immortal caustic yet cool countenance so firmly inhabits its spotlight. And yet, writer/director Richard Brooks spends several opening scenes keeping his peerless leading man waiting in the wings. After all, throughout the film Bogart’s Ed Hutcheson, editor of fictional New York newspaper The Day, keeps referencing the “fifteen-hundred people” that work for him, and so it’s only right to show them and what they do before bringing their leading man onscreen. That’s why in these introductory minutes we hear the tuneful thwack of the printing press and see editors putting out fires and cleaning up messes. These scenes are Brooks laying out the stakes – which are, this, the paper itself, the news, that it gets told, and that all this is what stands to be lost in the wake of what is to come in “Deadline U.S.A.”

To those of us lamenting the newspaper’s gradual decline and seemingly imminent demise, “Deadline U.S.A.” comes across quaint and urgent all at once. Newspapers were always under threat, if just for different reasons, in the case of Brooks’s film being that there were too many of them. A rival paper wants to buy up The Day and bury it, and has the chance when the paper’s storied owner dies and his heirs want nothing to do with holding aloft the beacon of journalism. Bogart’s Ed finds this out at the same time that a young reporter (Warren Stevens), trying to ferret out a scoop on a gangland murder, gets beaten to within an inch of his life, causing Ed to take out a front page editorial, call the mob out and then go all in on some hardcore reporting to get to the bottom. This puts him straight in the crosshairs of losing his job and maybe his life, enough for any man, except he’s also dealing with his ex-wife (Kim Hunter), whom he still loves, and who is about to get married to some joker we know is a joker all because he isn’t Bogart.

See, that’s why it’s a Bogart movie, allowing him to deftly navigate this myriad of minefields, and even if you know each mine will be diffused, even the one involving his ex-wife, where her you sort of wish her understanding that he is truly married to the newspaper business (which he understands too) would allow her to exit the picture stage left, that Bogey ability to hold a scene, hold a room, hold a frame, makes it extraordinarily exciting anyway. Indeed, he does not merely get to sit in the back of a gangster’s limousine and coolly handle thinly veiled threats, he is allowed to stand up in a courtroom and give a big speech. If the latter seems patently absurd, how his character essentially gets into a shouting match with lawyers while the judge’s gavel remains silent, the outcome nevertheless subscribes to the letter of the law even if the Judge confesses to subscribing to The Day. Yet even in the face of this, Ed pulls off a coup, able to both save the paper and get the goods on the mob man he’s after, a storyline that, frankly, connects with dots with little narrative verve, just a means to hang the point of the print paper on, though damn, man, what a point.

That point comes through much better earlier on when a key witness, turning up at The Day to go on the record, is escorted to safety by a few cops summoned by Ed, though one of these cops is revealed as a hitman in disguise, leading to a showdown in the printing room where the notion of stop the presses get all twisted up. The witness falls to his death, jamming up the printing press itself, a fairly obvious symbol that is no less effective, crime trying to deter the reporting that is trying to take it down. If you never see how this ghastly mess gets cleaned up, well, you don’t need to, because emblematically this mess gets cleaned up by keeping the journalistic light trained squarely on those who would snuff it out. Stop the presses? Please. Not on Humphrey Bogart’s watch.