The Bogart biography by Sperber & Lax and By myself and Then Some by Lauren Bacall both narrate with minutia his last years (friends gathered at his butternut room, The Rat Pack leaded by Frank Sinatra - who wooed Bacall and retracted later - his brave and silent fight against esophagus cancer, his children Stephen and Leslie). Bacall's memoirs book is an excellent recount of her romance with Bogart. "Never damage your own character," he taught Bacall, "Bogie, with his great ability to love, never supressing me, helping me to keep my values straight in a town where there were few, forcing my standards higher - To be good was more important than to be rich. To be kind was more important than owning a house or a car. To never sell your soul was most important of all".
Bogart is one of my best celluloid crushes, he embodies in the purest form a portrayal, a past master, the stuff that dreams are made of (a line he suggested to Huston for The Maltese Falcon).
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Article comments
1 - Alan Kurtz
On page 3, you write: "My favorite performance of Bogart is In Another Place (1950) directed by Nicholas Ray."
Yet in the preceding paragraph you refer to "Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950)."
May we assume one of these titles is correct? If so, it might be nice to use it consistently, especially since that's your favorite performance of Bogart.
2 - kendra
The correct title is "In a Lonely Place", sorry that was a typo!
3 - Alan Kurtz
I keep reminding my fellow Blogcritics writers, we can't rely on our editors to help wring mistakes out of our prose. BC's editors are for the most part nonprofessionals with neither the time, the skill, nor the inclination to read our stuff carefully. A recent example comes from BC's politics section, where in his very first sentence the author misidentifies George H.W. Bush "as 43rd President of the United States." (He was #41; his son was #43.) And this slipped by in, mind you, the politics section, where any editor worth his salt would've spotted and corrected that immediately.
As a writer, I strive to live up to the second adjective in the motto that BC founder Eric Olsen emblazoned on the masthead of each and every page on this site: "A sinister cabal of superior writers." The sinister part is a joke, of course; but I take superior very seriously.
And for those of us who subscribe to that ethos, we have to do it ourselves, since our editors are useless in that regard.
4 - kendra
I want to thank you, Aln, for having pointed this mistake out, and the Blogcritics editors team for having fixed it.
5 - nate
Good review of a timeless icon
6 - kendra
thanks, Nate! Bogart is a timeless figure, The London Times wrote his screen persona was the male equivalent to the hooker with a heart gold that Marilyn Monroe constructed.