The African Queen 1951 - A successful mixture of adventure, comedy and star chemistry

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: John Huston
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Robert Morley, Peter Bull, Theodore Bikel

"Adapted from a novel by C.S. Forester, The African Queen stars Humphrey Bogart in his Oscar-winning portrayal of Charlie Allnut, the slovenly, gin-swilling captain of a tramp steamer called the African Queen, which ships supplies to small East African villages during World War I. Katharine Hepburn plays Rose Sayer, the maiden-lady sister of a prim British missionary, Rev. Samuel Sayer (Robert Morley). When Germans invade and Samuel dies, Allnut offers to take Rose back to civilization. She can't tolerate his drinking or bad manners; he isn't crazy about her imperious, judgmental attitude. However it does not take long before their passionate dislike turns to love. Together the disparate duo work to ensure their survival on the treacherous waters and devise an ingenious way to destroy a German gunboat. The African Queen may well be the perfect adventure film, its roller-coaster storyline complemented by the chemistry between its stars. The profound difficulties inherent in filming on location in Africa have been superbly documented by several books, including one written by Katharine Hepburn." - www.allmovie.com

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The asphalt jungle 1950 - The 'perfect' crime and its consequences

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IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: John Huston
Main Cast: Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore, Sam Jaffe, John McIntire, Mark Lawrence, Marilyn Monroe

"The Asphalt Jungle is a brilliantly conceived and executed anatomy of a crime - or, as director John Huston and scripter Ben Maddow put it: 'a left-handed form of human endeavor'.
Recently paroled master criminal Erwin 'Doc' Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe), with funding from crooked attorney Emmerich (Louis Calhern), gathers several crooks together in Cincinnati for a Big Caper. Among those involved are Dix (Sterling Hayden), an impoverished hood who sees the upcoming jewel heist as a means to finance his dream of owning a horse farm. Hunch-backed cafe owner (James Whitmore) is hired on to be the driver for the heist; professional safecracker Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) assembles the tools of his trade; and a bookie (Marc Lawrence) acts as Emmerich's go-between. The robbery is pulled off successfully, but an alert night watchman shoots Ciavelli. Corrupt cop (Barry Kelley), angry that his 'patsy' (Lawrence) didn't let him in on the caper, beats the bookie into confessing and fingering the other criminals involved. From this point on, the meticulously planned crime falls apart with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
Way down on the cast list is Marilyn Monroe in her star-making bit as Emmerich's sexy 'niece'; whenever The Asphalt Jungle would be reissued, Monroe is prominently in the print ads as one of the stars. The Asphalt Jungle was based on a novel by the prolific W.R. Burnett, who also wrote Little Caesar." - www.allmovie.com

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Key Largo 1948 - Gangster melodrama in the guise of film noir

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IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: John Huston
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor

"John Huston's Key Largo - based on Maxwell Anderson's play - shares crucial similarities and differences with Archie Mayo's The Petrified Forest, also starring Humphrey Bogart but made 12 years earlier. The two plots are similar - a group of people held hostage in a remote locale by a gangster on the run - but the differences between the two movies, and Bogart's roles in them, reflect changes in the world and in perceptions of evil and how to deal with it. Where The Petrified Forest was steeped in romantic notions of self-sacrifice, rationalizing the loss of life in World War I, Key Largo implicitly questioned the right of any moral person to withdraw from the responsibility of taking moral action - and it even questioned the wisdom of self-sacrifice. The Petrified Forest's dreamy poet (Leslie Howard) nobly sacrifices himself to see the capture of the deadly sociopath played by Bogart. In Key Largo, Bogart plays embittered, disillusioned war veteran Frank McCloud, who starts the film with nothing to live for and discovers, in the course of fighting and killing old-time gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), that there is a reason to remain engaged with the world and with his fellow human beings. The difference between the two movies was the intercession of World War II, in which society encountered the most monumental evil on as large a scale as was imaginable. Made in the wake of the war, with the Cold War and the Red Scare just getting rolling, Key Largo was almost a call to arms to any decent people watching that they were too important to withdraw from battlefields old or new, and that there were still battles to be fought that were worth fighting, as well as winning.
Claire Trevor's virtuoso performance as a besotted ex-nightclub singer won her an Academy Award - as predicted by her admiring fellow actors, who watched her go through several very difficult scenes in long, uninterrupted takes. While Key Largo sags a bit during its more verbose passages, on a visual level the film is one of the best and most evocative examples of the 'film noir' school." - www.allmovie.com

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The treasure of the Sierra Madre 1948 - The tale of greed and its consequences

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IMDB rating: 8,4

Director: John Huston
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett, Barton MacLane

"Loosely based on the Biblical parable of the thieves and the 'Pardoner's Tale' in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, John Huston's morality tale is one of the great cinematic proofs of the Biblical adage radix malorum est cupitidas, or, the root of evil is the love of money. The film is a clever study of the erosive effect that money can have on flawed men's characters. Shot entirely on location in Mexico, the film's dry and dusty atmosphere is clearly authentic. Humphrey Bogart's maniacal Fred Dobbs is one of moviedom's great characterizations, a conglomeration of cunning, greed and paranoia. As his wealth mounts, so does his distrust. While external threats abound, the real enemy lies within. The Treasure of the Sierre Madre examines the essential existential hopelessness and loneliness of the avaricious man, drawing an implicit parallel between the prospectors and man's contemporary pursuit of material wealth. A failure with audiences who apparently didn't want to see Bogie playing such a nefarious anti-hero, the movie is now recognized by most critics as an American classic. For the first time ever, a father and son - Walter Huston (for best supporting actor) and John (for directing and screenplay) - won Oscars for their stellar work." - www.allmovie.com

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The Maltese falcon 1941 - The first film noir

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IMDB rating: 8,2

Director: John Huston
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre, Barton MacLane, Sydney Greenstreet

"Adapting Dashiell Hammett's novel - and staying as close to the original story as the Production Code allowed - first-time director John Huston turned The Maltese Falcon into a movie often considered the first film noir. In his star-making performance as Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart (taking over from George Raft) embodied the coolly ruthless private eye who recognizes the dark side of humanity, in all its greedy perversity, and who feels its temptations, especially when they are embodied by a woman. While Huston's mostly straightforward visual approach renders The Maltese Falcon an instance of early noir more in its hardboiled attitude than in the chiaroscuro style common to other films noirs, the collection of venal characters, colorfully played by Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook, Jr.; Mary Astor's femme fatale; and Bogart's morally relativistic Spade pointed the way to the mid-1940s flowering of noir in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), and Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). A critical as well as popular success, The Maltese Falcon was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, establishing Huston as a formidable dual talent and Bogart as the archetypal detective antihero who can be as unscrupulous as the next guy but also adheres to his own personal code of honor." - www.allmovie.com

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