Nitrate & Camphor: A Boge with Bogart, a Memory with The Maltese Falcon
- blueshiftjournal
- Oct 12, 2016
- 6 min read
by ben del vecchio, columnist
ni∙trate /nītrāt/ n. salt, or ester, or nitric acid. the most water-soluble of all salts.
cam∙phor / ˈkamfər/ n. a white, volatile, crystalline substance with a strong smell and bitter taste. when combined with nitrate, creates celluloid; film.
Some say smokers never forget their final drag, their last pull, the definitive ash-ing of their concluding cigarette. I couldn’t tell you about mine. It got lost somewhere between Los Angeles and Boston – maybe in a sunny ashtray, maybe in an overcast gutter down some city alley. It didn’t matter much to me, but part of me thinks it should’ve, and part of me wants to have.
My wallet thanks me daily, but posters of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Humphrey Bogart don’t quite look at me the same way anymore. I walked into the Brattle Theater last night with a set of lungs filled with fresh air and a sinking feeling that somehow, I was letting someone down, and that somewhere, sometime, somebody chomping on a cigarette at the cinema was shaking his head in shame. Oh, well. He can have fun in the 1940s. I’ll settle for civil rights and Snapchat.
The past is something the Brattle Theater does alright by. Its walls are dripping with it. Joining us for our movie was the theater’s permanent in-house audience, a faction familiar to any film fan: the unforgettable coterie of Casablanca. Rick’s Café was painted on the Brattle’s walls like something out of a dream – in one corner, Peter Lorre’s scheming and despicable Ugarte watched on. In the other, Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa Lund stood with a look that could cut through Kevlar right to your heart. On the back wall leaned Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, supervising, cigarette dangling from his lip like a forgotten promise. Romantic stuff. You could almost hear La Marseilles emanating from the backroom – or maybe it was just something by Taylor Swift.
Bets on nostalgia were winners that night at the Brattle. The theater owner informed us that the Rick’s Café homage was etched in honor of the 1960s, when, during Harvard University’s reading week, the Brattle would screen Bogart’s best films. Students would don dinner coats and fedoras, smoke cigarettes, sip champagne on the mezzanine, and sing along to “As Time Goes By.” Quite a scene. Casablanca, of course, was the experience etched in everyone’s memory, but the Brattle also screened The Maltese Falcon – Bogart’s breakout role, the foundation of film noir, and the reason cigarettes and cinema go hand in hand.
Who’s good and who’s bad? Moral ambiguity, and questioning of authority (in this case, P.I. vs. the cops) are classic Noir tropes
Film noir is a devilish genre, but the devil, as always, is in the details. Forget plots, it’s style over substance ‘round these parts, and we’ll buy any semblance of story so long as it doesn’t break under the weight of stilettoes, sex, or avarice. The case that The Maltese Falcon sells concerns P.I. Sam Spade (Bogart) and his entrapment in a crime-riddled web spun by a “swell lot of thieves” including Brigid O’ Shaughnessey (Mary Astor), Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) and Kasper “Fat Man” Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet). Their goal is to snare a priceless artifact with a storied history: the Maltese Falcon. Soon enough, the bird is Spade’s target, too, and he’s not one to miss.
The Falcon is a perfect example of one of Hitchcock’s MacGuffins: an object that motivates plot and characters, but has no weight with the audience (think of the microfilm in North by Northwest or the suitcase in Pulp Fiction). Spade puts it best. After one character remarks, “A thrilling story, that one about the falcon.” He’s quick to the trigger, “Yeah, or ridiculous.”
In the end, it’s both. The Maltese Falcon is wound so tightly that it explodes on the screen – the 100-minute runtime flies by so fast, you barely question the reams of plot that Bogart and co. chew through. Bogie certainly carries the picture, but Lorre and Greenstreet pull more than their own weight. A year after The Maltese Falcon, both actors would rejoin Bogart in Casablanca.
From left to right: The excellent cast of The Maltese Falcon: Bogart, Lorre, Astor, Greenstreet
Noir has shadows you can touch, and enough cigarette smoke you can choke just watching. The Maltese Falcon is no exception; it is, in fact, the foundation. With its stylized lighting, vernacular dialogue, a lie-laden labyrinthine plot, hard men, and harder women (who could just as quickly kill you as love you to death), The Maltese Falcon is a genre blueprint in black and white.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the text it was based on (an almost scene-for-scene adaptation, by the way) was similarly influential: iconic hard-boiled writers such as Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard and William Burroughs have all said they owe something to The Maltese Falcon.
The film is, as Sam Spade says, “the stuff that dreams are made of.” It swooped to a sexy, stylish, and smoke-filled success on the back of the dreams of John Huston – a then first-time director who would go on to make such classics as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, and The African Queen – all of which feature Bogart as the lead.
Huston’s style shines. While he was busy storyboarding every single frame of The Maltese Falcon (a tactic that Hitchcock would adopt for almost every film), Orson Welles was across town changing cinematic history with Citizen Kane. Welles is remembered fondly as an innovator; Huston, not so much. His work on this film, however – from angles to long takes and lighting – merits commemoration, and he, unlike Welles, worked the screenplay on his own. Not so bad for a newbie.
One of Huston’s beautifully composed shots – the window’s curtains in the background rustle in the 2AM breeze throughout the sequence – one long take of Spade’s nightstand
Bogart owes as much to Huston as the director does to the icon – it was his hard-boiled and skeptic turn as Sam Spade that paved the way for Bogie’s role as “stick-my-neck-out-for-nobody” Rick Blaine in Casablanca. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role, harder still to imagine him without Bogart’s trademark cigarette-smoking panache. Is there anyone who smokes like he does?
On set, the cast and crew were told by Jack Warner of Warner Bros. to keep smoking to a minimum (to prevent audience members from dipping out into the lobby for one of their own). Bogart and Lorre, in keeping with noir’s anti-authority sentiments, decided to annoy Warner by smoking as much as possible. There’s rarely a scene in the film where one of them isn’t lighting up. Warner was less than pleased. Huston, taming the flames, managed to convince him that cigarettes created an atmospheric tension that added to the film. With that, a noir precedent was set. Lorre’s Joel Cairo wouldn’t be half the nervous wreck he is if his cigarette wasn’t constantly about to fall out of his hands – Bogart’s Sam Spade wouldn’t be the same kind of cool if he wasn’t constantly rolling, licking, and wrapping up a smoke.
I’ve lost my way somewhere in describing this wonderful film. The lights are so gorgeous, the darks so mesmerizing, it’s so easy to wander down its alleyways, lose yourself in its smoky environs, and forget where you are in its convoluted plot. The Maltese Falcon is a film about truths and lies, blacks and whites, and everything in between. By the end, you’re not at all sure who has lied and about what, and you’re even less sure what is real and what is not. But you do know what a good film is, and you can be damn sure The Maltese Falcon is a great one.
Stumbling out of the Brattle, still untangling myself from the Falcon’s claws, I caught sight of a caricature I hadn’t seen before. The narrow passageway that leads to the Brattle’s exit was guarded by a towering figure: large, looming, and white-haired. Any other night, I would’ve recognized him as Casablanca’s own fez-wearing, blue-parrot-toting Signor Ferrari. But tonight, he was Kasper Gutman, and he stared me down, chuckle in his eye, cigarette in hand. Next to him another Rick Blaine gave me similar glare as he puffed away at his.
I look into their eyes and thought of Greenstreet and Bogart, Lorre and Astor, Brando, Dean, Hepburn, Grant, Connery, Thurman and Nicholson. Of all the cinemas, in all the towns in all the world, I had to walk into the one with the Casablanca wall art, and the Humphrey Bogart tribute, during the week I quit smoking. Pretty damn romantic.
I dug through my backpack, found one last cigarette. At least I’d get my memory.
My last smoke was in a Cambridge archway, in early fall, standing next to Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet – and as far as last memories go, that ain’t bad at all.
I lit, pulled, dragged, and ashed. Thanks for that, Bogie.
Nitrate and camphor, the chemical couple that birthed celluloid, play host a thousand times a week, in a thousand cities, in a thousand hearts. Join them. I’ll see you there.
