Nobody Is

There is a convention readily accepted by the young that they be as embarrassed by the personal as their elders are. For only those elders (we young surmise) can afford to treat emotional bosom-baring with the same glee that we hopefully accept the newest breasts of the French white slave exporters; and only the elders can be as sumptuously indifferent to such revelation as we imagine we ought to be. But tortured youth is famously ignorant in its desire to be duped, and the least affectation that can promote an opportunity for uninterrupted enjoyment of soul-searching (without the redium of Hollis Hall sexual reminiscences or the drunken rodomontades in the back booths of Cronin's) is easily assumed.

Now if this were seriously offered as a motive for the erection of Humphrey Bogart as a culture hero, then this review could be assured of the same uneducated silence that local audiences give to jokes about meat rationing in movies of the 'forties: or acknowledged with the same smug chuckle of the rare undergrad who recognizes the reference to "red points" for what it is, and hoarsely tells his neighbors of his knowledge. But the unashamed hilarity that attends the Bogart festival at the Brattle is indicative that the greatest part of the audience is as ignorant of their escape into adolescent self-satisfaction, as they would be unready to admit that flight. For most, Bogey flicks will happily remain as opportunities to relish vicariously the succession of unachieved sexual encounters of Marlowe/Spade/Bogart or to laugh at the thick ankles popular in a heftier age. For any who are made uncomfortable by the realities that crawl slightly under the surface of most Bogey pictures (the frightening and disgusting homosexual misogynism of Capote's Beat the Devil, for example) there are hundreds, one fears thousands, who percieve only the reasonable superficial escapist qualities of all movies herein, performed delightedly and genially by Bogart, Bacall, the Houstons, Elisha Cook, Lorre, Greenstreet, and the gang.

But if we have to consider Bogart, beyond his affectionate and effacing pose as the achieved (intellectual equals impotent) orgasm, as an escape peculiar to the adolescent, (and his academic older brother, the scholar who nourishes his adolescent awareness for the rest of his emotional days) then we're ready for a final justification that ought to serve to appease the angers of those already offended by the members of clay so far revealed. Ultimate consideration of the Bogart mystique as the Bildungsroman for an age that takes cheerily to names and literary sorrow from the post-war boys (Mailer, Salinger, Kerouac) and can find, with the jubilance of the healthy competitive student, nothing true in the struggling art of its peers, those now circa twenty, cannot help but be instructive to anyone--be he Harvard '37 or Harvard '63--who wants to probe his son or his roommate.

The desperate means that men have always taken to conceal their fears from themselves have always enjoyed analysis by adolescents, and this review can only be as ostentatious as my traumae will permit it to be (there's embarrassing personal stuff for you); but I offer two thoughts for self-flagellation. First, that Bogart pictures (leaving out of consideration such dismal offerings as Crime Doesn't Pay and High Sierra) need to be more seriously examined for the qualities that allow them to endure beyond their showings in the 'forties, and sporadic reincarnation on the Late Late Show; for I contend that they "touch immortality" in many ways that ought to be disconcerting to that portion of their audiences that grow increasingly precocious viewing the jucier parts of Virgin Spring or La Dolce Vita. Disconcerting in that they advocate immorality of the sort that even right-thinking undergrads (who allow it in thumbed copies of The Naked Lunch, and sublimate it in Down At The Dinghy) ought to resent: they advocate a soft, yielding, and likewise feminine calculating examination of life. And secondly, that no man can afford to take any Bogart picture more seriously than it affects/effects him on the first viewing: that this article is only as off-the-cuff and irrepressibly impudent as any Bick seminar, and no one has a right to insinuate that his Bogart is nicer than mine.