No, actually, back up a minute. I take that back. I am bothered by Clooney’s glass jaw. It’s not that I think the leading man should always be the winner in every fight or that I think he’s too pretty to be knocked about like that (well, maybe a little) but it interferes with that Casablanca image in my head.

You see, it gradually dawned on me that the problem with this movie was that my expectations from it and what I’d been handed were two completely different things. I was ready and primed for a Bogart special but what I was watching on screen was a Joseph Cotten performance.

By his own admission (video below), Clooney has certain limitations as an actor: unlike his co-star Blanchett, his personality forms the bedrock of every performance he gives onscreen. It is fairly impossible to forget that you are watching a George Clooney film – and that’s not always a bad thing. In the case of The Good German, it even works to his advantage because it is a role that requires star wattage. After all, Bogart was also one of those actors who brought along his personality as a package deal.

In this movie, however, they seem to have captured the image but left the personality behind. Unlike Clooney, Bogart showed every one of his excesses on his face and always had a suggestion of brutality about him. In the years since his death he has been transformed into some kind of dashing figure but the cold fact is that the few times you saw Bogart in a tux, like in Sabrina for example, he looked like he couldn’t wait to rip it off.

The man who played Bogart’s role in Sabrina Fair (the stage version), however, looked completely at home. That man was Joseph Cotten. Like Clooney, Cotten had an all-American face and exuded a sort of manly dependability. He’d come on screen and you’d instinctively know he was the good guy. He could be an aristocrat if he chose but he was really the guy next door.

If you take away that iconic image of Bogart in a trenchcoat, he only ever looked “classy” with a couple of actors in his life – one of them was Lauren Bacall, another was Ingrid Bergman. These two ladies in particular shared a chemistry with him that allowed him to be the scruffy beat-up tough he so patently was while managing to bring out a hidden tenderness that made movie-goers swoon.