Hard, without a gun: book review

Bogart was much more colorful, although these are not exactly deeply go organic.

By Stefan Kanfer button, 288 pages, $26.95

Humphrey Bogart was born a rich child in Manhattan and spent his youth on Broadway Twits play dressed in striped jackets and white ducks, "energetic input with a bat or a cocktail in your hand." Whether he actually said "tennis, anyone?" is a matter of debate. And Stefan Kanfer in his critical biography hard told without a gun, when Bogart pensive 1936 drama the petrified forest was cast as gangster Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood's, it was so against type. It was also a triumph and his ticket to Hollywood-where he spent five years doing time as masks, shot in film after film, before John Huston the role of Sam Spade in the Maltese of Falcon offered him (after George raft turned down there) and he was, durable, the we know that Bogart. Until then, he was 42.

None of this is news. Kanfer's okay in lifting material from other sources, but he is not a deep graves. I was surprised to learn that the star's funeral, 1957, he was reminded as a brain, which "could recite whole swaths of Plato, Pope, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Shakespeare from memory." Really? Kanfer are earlier, there is no indication that he a thinker or, indeed, had no extracurricular interests apart from sailing, cigarettes and alcohol. His marriage to Lauren Bacall was happy (after failure with Helen Menken and Mary Philips, then a real humdinger with Mayo Methot, an alcoholic Harpy, threw tantrums, threw bottles and at one point literally stabbed him in the back), but don't try Kanfer, to explore, like Bacall, hardly about girlhood, with her depressed, to put hard - drinking, in the middle ages and, apparently, Schürzenjäger mate.

Late in the book Kanfer maintains, rather prissily, that "would Bogart by the today's Hollywood products, by the headline-grabbing stars be dismayed, hotel room trash"; He seems to his own account of the actor and his third wife, dead drunk, firing pistols in the ceiling have forgotten of your room in Naples. ("The crashes of plaster were almost as loud as the recording.") He heralds (twice) of the American Film Institute's citation of Bogart as "the largest male legend in the history of cinema" and a similar recognition of entertainment weekly. He is so deliberate in pursuit of random praise, even a post office official citing that in revealing a Bogart stamp.

Why this despair to his theme of pump? No one is a challenge to bogie of status as a symbol. But, as Kanfer acknowledges, he was never a strong performer without a strong Director: he appeared in a handful of treasures and a whole series of unexploded ordnance. Still, he was brave off-screen as his dealings with the House UN-American activities Committee unfortunately show. He was not once set up, in the choice of material ventures. "When Helen Hayes, late in his life, Bogart suggested, back on the stage, he crawled:" these bastards go would all out in the lobby and say: "so that's what great big star-a big major player has come to us."... "No, not I could do."

The book is subtitled a study promises "The life and extraordinary life after the death of Humphrey Bogart." The extraordinary beyond consists of a 20-seitigen chapter in the Kanfer explained that Bogart strongly, influenced the character, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathlessand Charles Aznavour in shoot the piano player; Quotes some lines from Woody Allen's play it again, Sam; and Bogart takes the Festival to note and "Bogart-themed bistros, taverns and bars", a pizzeria in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. Madly, he is to also discussed many, many books have been written, have his theme, the inevitable question: why another?

I haven't a clue.