Key Largo (1948) ***1/2

Release Date: July 16, 1948

Running Time: 101 minutes

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore

Directed by: John Huston

The final, and best, collaboration between Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, Key Largo can be chalked up among the best films starring either powerhouse. It was based on a play by Maxwell Anderson that opened nearly a decade before and retains some of the feeling of a play. But where other films have suffered from this Key Largo flourishes, primarily because it  benefits greatly from the stuffiness and claustrophobia that is inherent in many filmed plays. That atmosphere plays into the story’s strengths and elevates it above similar filmed plays like The Petrified Forrest. 

Key Largo begins with Frank McCloud (Bogart), an army veteran, traveling to Key Largo, Florida to meet the father of George Temple, one of his army friends who perished in the war. He’s also there to pay his respects to George’s widow. The two live in a hotel on the island that is in the process of buckling down in preparation for an oncoming hurricane. Frank’s welcome is a little cold from the guests of the hotel who immediately seem cold and unfriendly with the exception of Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor) an alcoholic woman who can’t function without being constantly inebriated. The others, Toots (Harry Lewis), Curly (Thomas Gomez), Ralph (William Haade), and Angel (Dan Seymour) insist that the hotel is closed and Frank would be better moving on. A sixth guest remains unseen upstairs in their room. 

Frank receives a more warm welcome from the hotel’s owner, George’s father James (Lionel Barrymore) and his daughter-in-law Nora (Lauren Bacall). The two have been starving for information about Nora’s deceased husband and are excited to meet Frank, especially after he proves to them just how close he was to George during the war. James, who is wheelchair bound, invites Frank to stay on at the hotel once the hurricane passes but Frank is reluctant to accept the offer. 

As the winds begin to pick up the final guest of the hotel makes his appearance. Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) is a former heavyweight gangster, a relic of the Prohibition Era who has found himself being kicked out of the United States. He is hiding out at the hotel, waiting out the storm as well as a visit from some contacts intent on buying counterfeit money from him, before setting sail back to Cuba. His ultimate goals are a little vague but there is some talk of re-establishing prohibition so that a select number of gang leaders can profit again from the racket rather than the self-destructive way it happened the last time. It is a weak motive that feels exactly like it is, a pipe dream and maybe Rocco even believes that a little, even as he is fleeing back to Cuba.

The rest of the film is taught and intense as Rocco holds everyone hostage inside the hotel while the storm prevents anyone from leaving. Things are not rosy for Rocco though as the claustrophobia brought on by the storm starts to wear on his state of mind, driving him to be more and more uneven as the hours pass. This coupled with his natural cruelty leave Frank, James and Nora as well as a captured deputy, Sawyer, in fear of their lives. 

Key Largo is a beautifully made film that almost gets away with faking it’s location. Discerning eyes will easily be able to tell that the entire film was made indoors, including scenes depicting the breach and ocean. Yet despite that it never feels small scale. There is no doubt this is a stage play adapted for the big screen yet, obvious sets or not, it feels at times more open than a typical play. Once the action moves entirely indoors though things change and it takes on a much different tone. This is intentional and as the characters start feeling trapped inside, so do we. This is well staged by a director who knew what he wanted to portray and exactly how to do it. Lip service is given about how stuffy the atmosphere inside has gotten despite the storm and the nighttime and the farther into things it gets the more the characters, Rocco especially, start perspiring. This helps sell the idea that Rocco is starting to feel the claustrophobia as he is trapped inside the hotel just as much as his hostages.

Rocco’s grasp on sanity is tenuous from the start and Robinson plays it to the hilt. We get glimpses of it early on in his contempt for Gaye. At first he seems more put out by her and her alcoholism, mocking her in front of his men and the hostages. Later, we get to see just how deep his inhumanity really goes. In one of the best scenes in the whole film he pushes Gaye into singing one of her stage tunes for the whole group with the promise that if she does he will allow her to have a drink, something he has withheld from her for several hours to the point she is shaking and desperate. She agrees and performs a song for the group, unpolished and poorly. Afterwards, Rocco mocks her attempt and refuses her the drink on the pretense that she doesn’t deserve it for such a lousy performance. Frank, pitying her, pours her a drink anyway, incurring the wrath of Rocco for his display of mercy. 

There is a sub-plot about some Seminole Indian friends of James Temple who usually use the hotel to shelter from hurricanes. Two of these are escaped convicts whom James has agreed to hide under the understanding that after the hurricane they will turn themselves in to the law. Rocco refuses to allow them access to the hotel and they must ride the storm out just outside the doors. This sub-plot really doesn’t go anywhere other than to provide a scapegoat for a murder later on as well as to demonstrate the humanity and good-natured personality of James and his daughter. For large stretches of the film we forget they are even outside during the events. It feels a little tacked on but otherwise serves it’s purpose, as little as that is. 

This is an actors film. It is filled with moments and monologues that could easily be used in a awards ceremony reel. Surprisingly only Claire Trevor came out of it with any real recognition securing a win at the Academy Awards for best supporting actress. Her afore mentioned musical number definitely helped her secure that win. But Bogart and especially Robinson are equally good here. There is a real nuance to Robinson’s portrayal here that heartens back to his earlier gangster rolls without falling back on stereotypes. Likewise, Bogart is great throughout as the war veteran who is conflicted about whether he is to be the hero or step back and wait things out. 

Key Largo has a reputation for a reason. It is a taught film full of claustrophobic atmosphere and many great moments. It is never boring and never runs out of steam. Then ending is a little rushed but otherwise is satisfying if not really surprising. Ultimately it is a well directed and well acted stage play that doesn’t expand the staging yet doesn’t need to. It is a satisfying watch and rightly deserves it position as a true classic of the era.

The Barefoot Contessa (1954) **1/2

Release Date: September 29, 1954

Running Time: 130 minutes

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Rossini Brazzi, Warren Stevens

Directed by: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The Barefoot Contessa is a prime example of style overshadowing substance. It is a gorgeous film to look at and the stars are beautiful, too. The acting all around is good to excellent. So why is it just a middle of the road film? What is it about this film that prevents it from being one of the greats from it’s era? 

This is the story of Maria (Ava Gardner), a stage performer at a restaurant in Spain who attracts the attention of film producer Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens), who is in the country scouting out some new talent for a film he is making. In tow is his chosen director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien), and a starlet whose only purpose in the film is to demonstrate how ill tempered Kirk can be when he feels someone is insulting him in any way. 

After seeing Maria perform, Kirk sends Oscar to try and get Maria to sit with them but he fails. Harry, who is more savvy and less excitable manages to get her to accept the invitation but the mannerisms of Kirk coupled with the abruptness and lack of tact from Oscar causes her to flee the table rather than listen anymore to them. Harry tracks her down to her home and manages to convince her to accept the opportunity to try out for the new film, leaving behind an abusive mother and a downtrodden father.

Naturally, Maria wows the filmmakers and lands the film. This leads to more starring rolls that propel Maria to movie star status. But Maria is not like the typical starlet obsessed with film success and her public image. When news that her father has murdered her mother back in Spain she drops everything to fly home and support her father despite how this may negatively impact her image. Likewise, she finds little to no enjoyment from the immaturity of the men who flock around her at gatherings.

The film opens and closes with Maria’s funeral, a bookend tactic that serves to drench the entire film with a sense of dread and uncertainty. We know immediately that everything in the rest of the film is leading up to her ultimate demise. This makes it difficult to enjoy much of the proceedings because we know where it is all leading to. Early on when Harry first gains an audience with Maria we see that the two have great chemistry together. It is palpable and the banter between them says more than just the words alone. It would be a sheer delight to watch this without the fore knowledge of where this ultimately leads.

The directing really lets this film down. Filmmaking 101 will teach you a fundamental truth: show, don’t tell. This truth is all but ignored in this film. Major important events happen off screen, portrayed by a sentence or two in dialogue, or (even worse) voice over. In one scene Maria gives a spectacular performance in the courtroom defending her father but we never see it or experience it in any way. We hear about it in voice over  narration by Oscar Muldoon as he watches it play out. There are many such instances like this that are unsatisfying and keep us at arms length. 

It is obvious that Mankiewicz fell in love with the duo of Harry and Maria as these scenes provide us with carefully crafted dialogue that nearly always hits. It is during these moments that we feel closest to Maria as a person and not as a film star. In fact the film never lets us see Maria as the latter. This starts out as intriguing but never pans out and thus leaves us frustrated and at arms length. This is not a knock on Ava Gardner’s portrayal. She is spot on playing a nationality she was not and delivering a strong, yet fragile woman is a foreign world. The blame is entirely on Mankiewicz who elected to explain everything through awful voice overs rather than find a more natural and satisfying way to get these things across.

The final result is an unsatisfying picture that tells an intriguing story in such a way as to dissolve nearly all the intrigue and interest through some very clumsy filmmaking. It is too long by nearly a half hour and tells you in the first minute that this is not going to have a happy ending. Tragedies can and do work in films but they require a skilled hand at developing characters we care about and can get invested in. This film keeps us at a distance at all times, drawing us a little in during just a handful of scenes between the two stars before kicking us back onto the sidelines. In the end it is just too difficult to get invested in what we already know is going to happen in the end.

To Have and Have Not (1944) **1/2

Release date: October 11, 1944

Running time: 100 minutes

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Walter Brennan

Directed by: Howard Hawks

Loosely based on the Ernest Hemingway novel by the same name, To Have and Have Not is really just an attempt to cash in on the success of Casablanca a few years earlier. Had it been made ten years earlier it might have been possible to make it more faithful to the book but by this point Bogart was trying to make his on screen persona a little less dark and villainous and thus we get a film that bears little resemblance to the novel to the point where even the title makes no sense with this plot.

The film opens with Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart), a ship captain for hire, who hires out to wealthy fisherman out of Martinique during the early days of WWII. He is partners with Eddie (Walter Brennan), an alcoholic whose ties to Harry are never really explored. On one such trip Johnson (Walter Sande) owes him a significant amount of money for the trip and intends to skip out on the bill. Harry discovers this when a woman, Marie (Lauren Bacall) pickpockets Johnson and is caught by Harry. When he confronts Johnson a shootout involving freedom fighters breaks out and Johnson is killed before he can pay the bill. This forces Harry into agreeing to smuggle into Martinique’s married couple involved in the resistance that the local government is on the lookout for. Harry states he is only interested in the money, yet he risks his own freedom to insure their safety even after he has been paid for the job.

Juxtaposed with the story is a blossoming romance between Harry and Marie, neither of whom refer to each other by their real names but instead use the names “Steve” and “Slim.” (This no doubt stems from the real life nicknames director Howard Hawks and his wife used for each other.) This romance doesn’t ring with the same level of credulity that we saw with Rick and Elsa in Casablanca, yet there is a certain steaminess to it absent from the earlier film. This can probably be chalked up to the real life romance blossoming between the two actors. Bacall is new to pictures here, having been hired by Hawks out of a desire to romance the young model, something that was stymied by the romance that developed between her and Bogart. He instead had to settle for an affair with the second lady, Dolores Moran. 

There is plenty of steamy dialogue between the two leads that barely gets by the censors enforcing the Hayes Code. “You don’t have to say anything and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together... and blow.” The line is delivered with a level of sultriness that raises the temperature in the room by several degrees. While not all the lines Bacall delivers land like this one, many do despite her obvious lack of experience on screen. The chemistry between Bogart and Bacall overcomes much of her inexperience. 

 What ultimately prevents this film from joining the absolute best films of the era is that it suffers from trying too hard to emulate Casablanca. The original novel was about a smuggler who took advantage of desperate people during the Great Depression, abandoning people in Cuba and making off with their money. This film wants to paint the picture of a reluctant hero who, in spite of not wanting to get involved in the politics of the war going on around him, finds his better nature prevents him from remaining neutral. This is the same dilemma Rick faced in Casablanca when tasked with aiding Victor Laslo and Elsa’s escape from the Nazis. This film however doesn’t have the heart that made that story so compelling. There is no love triangle history between Harry and the woman he is smuggling to Martinique. There is no painful history involved here. Neither of the two fugitives, Paul and Hélène are developed at all. Paul spends most of his screen time injured and lying in bed and Hélène’s character was diminished to standing by her man and expressing a lot of self doubt about why she is even there. Her role was meant to be a secondary love interest for Harry but was cut to near nothing once the heat between Bogart and Bacall ramped up.

Aside from Bogart and Bacall there are a few other things that keep the film from being dreadfully dull. One of those is the delightfully over-the-top performance of Walter Brennan as Eddie. Eddie is woefully underdeveloped as a character relegated to being an alcoholic who can only be persuaded to betray his friends if you withhold the alcohol. However that doesn’t matter as every time he is on screen he lightens the tone. He is a welcome addition to the film adding a levity that no other character can provide. Likewise, relative newcomer Dan Seymour, a character actor who primarily appeared in bit roles uncredited until the year prior to this, is delightfully cocky and smarmy as Captain Renard, the local authority who is certain Harry has smuggled in resistance members but lacks enough evidence to pounce. 

There is a lot going for To Have and Have Not, yet it can’t quite live up to its own ambitions. It wants to be an important picture but lives in the shadows of much better cinema. At no time is it unwatchable but it struggles to shake off an overall feeling that it could have been so much better had it not tried to redo that which had worked before and tried for its own identity. It is that flaw that makes it a lessor film in Bogarts oeuvre and really only worth seeking out to see where Bogart and Bacall began. The two would go on to star together in three more pictures, all of which were improvements over this one. Still, this is not a bad film, just an underwhelming one.

Conflict (1945) ***

Release Date: June 15, 1945

Running Time: 86 minutes

Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Rose Hobart, Sydney Greenstreet, Alexis Smith

Directed by: Curtis Bernhardt

Two years prior to The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Humphrey Bogart is cast as a wife killer. The primary difference between the two films seems to lie in a more concrete motive the audience would easily be able to latch onto rather than a dull level of confusion involving paintings and bribery. Here the motive is straight forward, love. Or perhaps lust would be a better word for what Bogart is seeking here.

The film opens on Bogart as Richard Mason, a man celebrating his fifth anniversary with his wife Kathryn (Rose Hobart). From the start it is obvious the marriage is an unhappy one, something Kathryn needles Richard about. She sees that he has an infatuation for her younger sister, Evelyn (Alexis Smith), and he doesn’t bother to deny it. Kathryn will not grant him a divorce and takes pleasure in letting him know that. Later, at the anniversary party, Dr. Hamilton (Sydney Greenstreet) entertains the guests with a story about an unhappy couple that will in many ways mirror the events to come.

On the drive home, Kathryn and Evelyn are talking and Kathryn attempts to convince her sister to leave town to visit their mother who is lonesome. Angered by this, Richard crashes the car, suffering a broken leg while the passengers escape unscathed. While recovering, Richard exaggerates the seriousness of his injury, pretending to need a wheelchair long after the cast has been removed. Under this guise, and arranging a work meeting that will prevent him from accompanying his wife to a mountain resort, he plans the perfect murder, one that he seemingly would be unable to have committed. The plan works out perfectly with one little exception. On her way out of town, Kathryn stops by Dr. Hamilton’s home and is gifted a rose that he pins to her jacket. This simple act of kindness will eventually be the key to unraveling her murder.

As a mystery, Conflict struggles a little. There really isn’t a true mystery here. We see the murder take place so we know Richard is the guilty party. The film is also very obvious when revealing the slip-up that will eventually be Richard’s undoing. We catch the mistake right away and, more importantly, the film wants us to know who else caught the mistake and knew what it meant. That robs the film of much of the suspense. Later into the picture we get what feels like an homage to The Tell-Tale Heart as little things start to happen or appear that would seem to suggest Kathryn may yet be alive. These events may confuse and disorient Richard but not the audience who was privy to the earlier slip-up and can put two and two together. 

This film could have been a train wreck with the wrong cast involved. What saves it is a truly stellar, if a little over-the-top performance by Bogart. We see from scene one that he is a deeply unhappy man wishing to be out from this marriage to a woman everyone around him thought was not a good fit. Dr. Hamilton even mentions at one point that no one thought the marriage would last. Richard and Kathryn are good at putting on a face around their friends but in private things are a little more honest and raw.  Bogart is an expert at portraying this pain and resentment. We feel for him, even though we can’t get behind him when he channels those feelings into murder.

Rose Hobart has a much harder part to play here. She has only a few scenes to get across where she is at in this relationship. Her interactions with Richard directly are sharp and mean-spirited at times yet we can also see that deep down she still loves Richard. When Richard is unable to go with her to the mountain resort she seems disappointed. Later, on the drive up the mountain alone, when she comes across Richard out in the middle of nowhere, she seems happy to see him at first, an emotion that would only be expressed in this situation were it were genuine. Rose has so little screen time as Kathryn yet we learn everything we need to know about her side of the marriage in those few scenes. 

Alexis Smith is plain awful in this film. She is badly miscast as the naive younger sister. She was much better served as the home-wrecker Cecily in The Two Mrs. Carrolls. She is never convincing when she is on screen and watching her act here is just plain painful. Sydney Greenstreet is better but he doesn’t have much of a character to work with. Dr. Hamilton is notable in one way though. It’s the only time he and Bogart co-starred in a film where he played a good guy and Bogart was the villain. 

Conflict is a good film but not a great one. The story is derivative and too heavily telegraphed to be much of a mystery. The supporting characters are all either forgettable or miscast. It glides by on the charisma of its two leads, Bogart and Hobart, who do an excellent job of showing rather than telling. This, and some fantastic filming (just look at the car crash and you’ll be amazed what can be done without CGI or fancy stunt driving) elevate this from its B movie trappings.

The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947) **

Release Date: March 4, 1947

Running Time: 99 minutes

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Alexis Smith, Nigel Bruce, and Ann Carter

Directed by: Peter Godfrey

An artist with a sadistic secret, a trusting wife who begins to suspect her husband is trying to kill her, and a rich woman who is trying her hand at home wrecker. All of this sounds like a typical season on a uninspired soap opera. For a daytime drama this might be passable but for an A-list motion picture starring some of the biggest actors and actresses of the day it is downright disappointing. 

Humphrey Bogart stars as Geoffrey Carroll, a painter who begins the film wooing Sally Morton (Barbara Stanwyck) while hiding from her that he is still married. When she finds out he lies and tells her that he is in the process of leaving his wife who, by his account, is an invalid. He also reveals that he has a daughter, Bea (Ann Carter). Sally wants nothing to do with all this and leaves him. Shortly thereafter Geoffrey’s wife dies from a mysterious illness and, soon after, Geoffrey and Sally get married.

Through a friend of Sally’s, Geoffrey is introduced to Cecile Latham (Alexis Smith), a wealthy woman who has set her eyes on him under the pretense of commissioning him to paint her portrait. What she really has in mind in to get between the couple and take Geoffrey for her own. Geoffrey is hesitant at first but eventually agrees to the job. Shortly thereafter, Sally starts getting sick much the same way the original Mrs. Carroll did. 

Reportedly Bogart didn’t want to be here at that time making this film. During the production he and Lauren Bacall tied the knot, even shutting down the filming while they went off on their honeymoon. Whether this event effected his performance or not can be debated but he does come across as not totally committed to the role. There are times where he looks like he would rather be somewhere else than on this set. Even when the moment calls for him to portray intensity he is not very convincing here. While some of his most intense performances were still in the future, most notably The Treasure of the Sierra Madre the following year, he had demonstrated in the past that he was capable of playing things dark and charming. 

Not all of the blame for this film falls on Bogart’s shoulders though. Barbara Stanwyck is equally poor in a role she allegedly took out of sheer boredom. In the early scenes she is entirely too chipper. Later on, as her suspicions of her husband deepen, she descends onto overacting and some of the most outrageously hilarious voice over ever put on screen. Whether you blame her for this or shift that blame to Peter Godfrey, the director, for staging it that way as well as not reigning in his actors, it amounts to the same, an over-the-top performance that is disjointed and laughable.

The rest of the cast is game, yet amount to mere caricatures. Nigel Bruce is perhaps the worst of these as Dr. Tuttle, an alcoholic physician whose boisterousness is only eclipsed by his ineptitude. Alexis Smith is a generic gold digger with the only distinction being she is the one with the gold. The only true standout amongst the secondary cast is young Ann Carreras the daughter Beatrice Carroll. Ann made a career out of playing characters like this and she is fantastic here, livening up every scene she is in.

This was never going to be a great film. It’s roots are as generic and cliché as the final product. The greatest performers would struggle to make this even a good film and, as mentioned above, it had some of the greatest performers in it. It’s a B film filled with A-list actors and actresses and as such it cannot possible escape that trapping. At best it is a somewhat generic thriller. At worst, it is a completely forgettable film best swept under the rug.

In a Lonely Place (1950) ***1/2

 Release Date: May, 17, 1950

Running Time: 94 minutes

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Martha Stewart

Directed by: Nicholas Ray

Humphrey Bogart proves that if anyone can make such a despicable character likable he can. That is a battle any seasoned actor would struggle with when tasked to play the role of Dixon Steele, a screenwriter struggling to write a hit film while simultaneously battling a raging temper that can turn deadly at any moment. Also, there is a romance involved, just to make things even more interesting.

Dixon hasn’t had a hit film in years, something that his agent reminds him at every turn. However, Dixon also refuses to take a sure-fire hit, adapting a best selling novel, because he doesn’t want to follow the one requirement stipulated with that assignment, remain faithful to the book. A young woman, the hat-check girl at the restaurant Dixon is dining in, Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart), has read most of the copy on the book and, with Dixon’s invitation, accompanies him to his apartment with the intention of walking him through the story. Afterwards she leaves on her own only to turn up murdered later that same night. The prime suspect is Dixon but his neighbor, Laurel (Gloria Grahame), saw the girl leave while Dixon stayed at home, providing him with a solid enough alibi to keep him from being arrested. A romance blossoms between the two but things soon turn dark as Dixon demonstrates that his temper is hot enough to possibly lead to murder. Soon, Laurel begins to doubt his innocence.

One of In a Lonely Place’s strengths is that it doesn’t tell you who killed the girl until the very end. At no point are we sure Dixon didn’t do it. We believe Laurel’s provided alibi but not that Dixon couldn’t have slipped away unseen and committed the murder anyway. The resolution is not made clear until things are revealed in the last couple of minutes and Bogart does a good job at keeping us guessing. Midway through the film in a fit of rage Bogart sideswipes a car while driving recklessly. When the other driver is acceptably upset with the damage to his vehicle things degenerate to Bogart beating him mercilessly, even to the point of picking up a rock with the intent of bashing the guys head in. Only the cries of Bogart’s passenger stop him from doing it. There is no question that he is capable of murder in the heat of anger. What we aren’t shown is if he could do it dispassionately. 

Bogart doesn’t play Dixon like a man who is innocent of the murder. Quite the opposite in fact. He is friends with one of the officers investigating the crime, Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), a man whom Dixon served with during the war. Brub invited Dixon over to dinner one evening and the interchange between Dixon, Brub, and Brub’s wife (Jeff Donnell) is chilling as Dixon relays in great detail how the murder could have been done. The scene is disturbing and effective at showing not only how good of an imagination Dixon has but that, alibi or no, he could easily have done it. It is easily one of the best scenes in the whole film. 

The romance between Dixon and Laurel starts to sour as Laurel starts to seriously doubt Dixon’s innocence after the brutal attack on the motorist. She begins to dread seeing him, yet he remains oblivious of this and presses her to marry him. She agrees but makes plans to flee rather than become his bride. Gloria Grahame portrays her uncertainty and fear perfectly which makes the final moments of this film all the more tragic. We feel her pain and fear even as she realizes that whether he is innocent or not he is still a dangerous man. 

In a Lonely Place is an acting powerhouse with tremendous performances by all the leads. It leaves you guessing at every turn without spoiling the surprise until the very last moment. Bogart manages to make Dixon Steele a likable character despite a growing sense of dread as we start to see just what he is capable of. Gloria is shot for shot at his level as the woman who falls in love, then slowly trades that love for fear of the man who is capable of anything. It is a well made film that is riveting from frame one and never lets up until the very end.

The Wagons Roll at Night (1941) **1/2

 Release Date: April 26, 1941

Running Time: 84 minutes

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Eddie Albert, Sylvia Sidney, Joan Leslie, Sig Roman

Directed by: Ray Enright

Eddie Albert stars as Matt, a local grocery clerk turned hero, then lion tamer in The Wagons Roll at Night. Pair that with an unscrupulous circus manager played by Humphrey Bogart, a drunken lion tamer incapable of keeping an aggressive lion named Caesar from escaping his cage and terrorizing a mother and infant, and a unconvincing love plot marred by murderous jealousy and you can see why this film doesn’t incite much excitement. 

The story is pretty straight forward. Nick Coster (Humphrey Bogart) owns and manages a circus. Through some carelessness Caesar the lion escapes and manages to enter a grocery store. The clerk on duty, Matt, manages to subdue the beast long enough for him to be recaptured. He is heralded as a hero for this, having also saved the lives of a woman and her infant. The resulting publicity leads Nick to hiring Matt as a new back-up lion tamer banking on the new found fame to draw in audiences. Also, Nick needs someone in the position because the current lion tamer, Hoffman, is an alcoholic and has become unreliable. Hoffman (Sig Roman) takes this personally and sets out to sabotage the new upstart. However Matt does well in the position and Nick fires Hoffman, while keeping Hoffman’s lions.

Hoffman refuses to accept Matt’s apology for taking his job and starts a fight that leaves Hoffman injured by Caesar. Fearing being accused of intentionally injuring Hoffman Matt is taken into hiding from the police by Nick’s girlfriend Flo Lorraine(Sylvia Sidney), to Nick’s family home even though Nick strongly objects to his family intermingling with the circus performers. There Matt meets Nick’s sister Mary and the two fall in love much to Nick’s strong objections. This leads to some clashing between the two men that ultimately turns deadly.

Eddie Albert was a relative newcomer when he starred in this film having hit the scene just three years prior. Even this early in his career he had charisma on screen that would help him become a bona fide star early into the 1940’s. Even so he is a little out of his comfort zone coming across as a little too naive. He would be completely overshadowed by Bogart and Sylvia Sidney were the two not badly miscast in roles outside their wheelhouse. At this point in his career Bogart was still mostly a secondary character actor best at playing gangsters and hoodlums. Here he is supposed to be a businessman running a somewhat successful circus and it never quite clicks. Likewise Sylvia comes across at times like she is in over her head and is never convincing as Nick’s love interest. 

There are plenty of good things to be said about this Stunt work with the lions is mostly convincing for its time, especially in the earlier scenes. The finale is harrowing and well staged if a little hammed up by Bogart’s performance. Eddie Albert is, as always, watchable even as he is a little green around the ears. 

This is an interesting period in Bogart’s career, just a year away from his big breakout in Casablanca. He was already trying to get away from the cliched mobsters he had made a career out of playing in the 30’s so taking a role like this makes sense for him. However he struggles with making it a truly memorable performance that could have elevated him and this film above merely passable entertainment. He would soon find his footing and become the star he is now known for but he wasn’t quite there yet. In the end, The Wagon’s Roll at Night is an average film, forgettable to all but the die hard Bogart or Eddie Albert fans.