I don't really like Humphrey Bogart.
Among cinematic icons, he's one of the iconiest. Put him up there with Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and John Wayne, and you've probably got your Mt. Rushmore of classic Hollywood. These are probably the four most popular dead stars to appear on posters, in any case.
The reason I've thought I don't really like Humphrey Bogart has to do with his personality. I've never particularly gravitated to actors who speak in a sharp, clipped way, endlessly confident and effortlessly cool. The fact that Bogart was a symbol of cool was what didn't jive with me. I didn't think he was that cool, nor did I think being cool was really that cool.
But recently -- actually as long ago as 2019, when I first considered this series -- I started to wonder whether it wasn't Bogart I didn't like, but the genre of films with which he is most associated.
Bogart more than anyone is the face of film noir, a genre that has often left me cold. I might have trouble putting into words what it is I don't like about noir, but it's some of the same things I've said above I don't like about Bogart. Fast-talking, cool-seeming, cigarette-smoking private dicks talking tough to femme fatales, who are also talking fast, seeming cool, and smoking cigarettes. I guess it just feels like a dated sort of artifice to me, with very specific and limiting signifiers, like light coming in through venetian blinds. No genre looks more like itself than film noir.
But my general antipathy toward the genre has also meant that I have not seen many of its landmark films. It could be like westerns, which I also didn't like much originally, but which have seen a huge jump in my appreciation over the past decade, when I've really started to dig into the genre's classics.
So, in 2021, I will watch those landmark noirs, one per month.
I will call the series Knowing Noir. I can't seem to get away from a clever title for these year-long monthly series, one that makes a play on the word Audient if possible, but uses alliteration if not possible, as in the current example. I was going to go with Audient Noir as the title, but just during the writing of this piece I decided to revert back to an earlier contender. So Knowing Noir it is.
I have no organizing principle for the order I will watch these films. I thought of trying to go chronologically, to see one movie's influences on the next, but I decided against it. As the titles I've gathered on my Letterboxd list all have release years between 1944 and 1955, that's a fairly tight period of time as it is, meaning we may not see that chain of influence as clearly as we would with more modern noirs.
Which is not to say I won't watch any modern noirs. I only have ten of the 12 titles selected so far, and that's pending their availability. But generally speaking, I've actually seen a lot more of the recent noirs, which are trying to build on or subvert a tradition established 80 years ago. It's that tradition I want to study in 2021, to get to the heart of whether I'm a noir fan or whether I really don't actually like them.
And I think there's a lot of potential for the former result. I have some noirs I absolutely love, first and foremost being Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. That of course was made in the 1970s and not the period in question, but I do have an example from the period in question as well -- an example that illustrates the possibilities for my own personal growth in this area. When I first saw Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), I didn't care for it -- in large part due to all my instinctual gut reactions to the genre, outlined above. But when I forced myself to rewatch it, to audit my own impression of it, I came away loving it on second viewing.
I hope that will be the case with the whole genre. And to get started, since I have no other organizing principle, I'm going to watch a movie that has come up more times than I can count in various film discussions and on various film podcasts over the years. And appropriately, it stars Humphrey Bogart.
So I will in fact kick things off in January with Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950), which falls in about the middle of the range of release dates of the movies I've identified. I don't know if that makes a huge amount of sense as a starting point, as a way to get a person's feet wet with noir, but it will allow me to scratch an itch I've been wanting to scratch for maybe five years now. The next time someone mentions In a Lonely Place, I'll finally be able to join the discussion.
I won't reveal the rest of the titles for now, as some will probably be inaccessible to me, and I'll have to replace them with others. There should be plenty to choose from, though.
And who knows? Maybe at the end of 2021, Bogart will seem like an old pal, someone I actually find cool rather than just "cool."
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