Humphrey Bogart is Really Dead

[LizzieMaine]

In the cultural sense, according to The Boston Globe.

 

[Big J]

Ouch, that's a shock. Does this mean that my grasping at aspects of the past is something to do with the psychology of being a 'boomer'/post-boomer? I'm confused, but intrigued.

 

[2jakes]

Ouch, that's a shock. Does this mean that my grasping at aspects of the past is something to do with the psychology of being a 'boomer'/post-boomer? I'm confused, but intrigued.

Not to worry !

Bogie is still Numero Uno !

 

[Big J]

Not to worry !

Bogie is still Numero Uno !

Here's looking at you kid! lol

 

[Fading Fast]

It's got to happen eventually, but it didn't seem that long ago that there was a mini-Bogie revival. I don't remember all the details, but didn't somebody bring out a Bogart line of furniture and wasn't - through CGI - Bogie seen selling soda or something all in the last 10 years or so?

If I'm reasonably right on the timeline (and I very well might not be), then his cultural fading is surprising as I would have thought it would take more time than that. That said, it does feel like some things aren't linear, but hit tipping points and maybe just enough people have passed away and just enough millennials are now adults that a guy from, basically, the 1940s can't survive.

 

[ChiTownScion]

My twenty-something friends know the name and the face, but I don't think that they fully appreciate the tough but fair, hard but tender nature of his screen persona.

One of my closest friends and lodge brothers is educated and very Era aware. He teases his very lovely wife with a routine he made up-- he told me that he envisioned, "some old time movie star like Humphrey Bogart " delivering the lines. I told him that the tough guy but insecure sexist mode was more in line with Cagney's than Bogie's characters... and here is the meme that was the result:

 

[LizzieMaine]

I can hear Cagney delivering those lines, and it's even funnier if his wife is played by Blanche Payson.

It can be argued that Bogart was bigger in the late sixties and early seventies that he was even in his lifetime -- he was embraced the first wave of Boomer college kids as the apotheosis of "countercultural cool," due to constant showing of his films on late-night television and at campus film-society screenings. That it was he who was chosen for this status rather than someone like William Holden, who was just as much of a cynical thumb-in-the-eye-of-authority screen character as Bogart, probably has more to do with the vagaries of film distribution and TV syndication than anything else. Bogart's films were everywhere at the time, and it was easy for kids to sieze on him as a symbol of their own views on authority. That gave him an artificially-inflated lifespan as a popuiar culture figure which, with those Boomer kids now senior citizens, is inevitably drawing to a close.

The Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields experienced the same sort of revival at the same time as Bogart, among the same type of people for the same reasons, and have become equally obscure. I offer Marx and Fields quotes all the time at work, and the kids have absolutely no idea who or what I'm talking about. They don't even recognize Groucho as the inspiration for the novelty nose-and-glasses disguise, and they have absolutely no idea who Fields was.

 

[Blackthorn]

It says far more about America as a...oh, I don't know...cultured, intelligent country, than it does about Bogart.

On the one hand Bogart will never die, as new generations discover him as I did, at age 28 (I'm 62 now). I saw him on the big screen at the Stanford theater just a few years ago, when they played Casablanca. The theater was full and at least half of the people were in their twenties or younger. And for many it was their first viewing of C. You could tell by the way they gasped at certain parts or laughed uproariously at some of the humorous lines.

But I guess, in a way, all Bogart movies (and all classic movies, perhaps) may become cult flicks, just like Rocky Horror, etc.

It's a sad place for this country to be. I guess it's time to go back to my favorite signature line:

Sam, if it's December, 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York? I bet they're asleep in New York. I bet they're asleep all over America.

 

[LizzieMaine]

But I guess, in a way, all Bogart movies (and all classic movies, perhaps) may become cult flicks, just like Rocky Horror, etc.

I think we're already there for most pre-1950 pictures, because unless you watch TCM, you just don't see them anywhere anymore. And even TCM is getting steadily more postwar in its focus.

Most movie personalities of the Era have long been culturally-dead. Everybody in 1937 knew what you meant by referring to someone as a "Ned Sparks character," for example, or a "Kay Francis type." But nobody today who isn't a hardcore thirties movie fan would have any idea what those phrases meant.

 

[Fading Fast]

My twenty-something friends know the name and the face, but I don't think that they fully appreciate the tough but fair, hard but tender nature of his screen persona.

One of my closest friends and lodge brothers is educated and very Era aware. He teases his very lovely wife with a routine he made up-- he told me that he envisioned, "some old time movie star like Humphrey Bogart " delivering the lines. I told him that the tough guy but insecure sexist mode was more in line with Cagney's than Bogie's characters... and here is the meme that was the result:

View attachment 33993

Cagney delivered dialogue with a rat-ta-ta-ta style that not only worked, but when you watch one of his movies over and over, can become mesmerizing as you focus on how he did it - how he kept it coming - how he memorized so many words and then delivered them at warp speed but without slurring, etc. Over the past several years, I went from liking Cagney (for some reason, I hadn't seen that many of his films) to recording TCM movies simply because he's in it.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I can hear Cagney delivering those lines, and it's even funnier if his wife is played by Blanche Payson.

Naw. She'd be closer to a young Kate Hepburn. Not gonna take any crap from a man, but a little more subtle than a rolling pin to the cranium in the means that she'd employ to put him in his place.

 

[tonyb]

I reluctantly accept that nothing lasts forever. It's a function of age, I suppose, having witnessed so many deaths and demolitions and other erasures from the world.

Still, I'm on the rolls at the Nat'l Trust for Historic Preservation, and I am pathologically averse to seeing old things tossed aside simply on account of their being old. So I do indeed resist. The knowledge that everything will someday come to an end doesn't mean I don't wish to delay that day as long as I can, at least for some of those things.

It would be fun to read what people were bemoaning the loss of 50 and 75 and 100 years ago. The old things we gaze upon through misty eyes today were once new themselves, and in many cases displaced things that had come before, and which held real significance in the lives of the people of their era.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There was a huge nostalgia craze in the mid-thirties for all things "Gay Nineties," where all the men in Baldheaded Row were lamenting that none of the Broadway cuties of 1934 could hold a candle to Lillian Russell.

 

[Feraud]

It can be argued that Bogart was bigger in the late sixties and early seventies that he was even in his lifetime -- he was embraced the first wave of Boomer college kids as the apotheosis of "countercultural cool," due to constant showing of his films on late-night television and at campus film-society screenings.

If any of what you wrote is correct, and I suspect it is, then perhaps Bogie is better off dead to pop culture.

Speaking of similar cringe worthy moments. Does anyone else remember a few years ago when American Apparel was exploiting the image of Anna May Wong?
They created t-shirts with Anna's image and the Chinese characters for "rebel".

 

[2jakes]

​“I likes the way tonyb thinks, so all of you mugs keep your traps shut...or else... ! "








( If Bogie was a member of the FL)

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Not to worry !

Bogie is still Numero Uno !

But then again that's the American Film Institute, not your garden variety, ballcap worn back to front, cultural neanderthal.

 

[EstherWeis]

Bogie Lives!

I used to watch old movies with my granddad.
Casablanca is such a classic! I can't recall how many times we saw that movie ( it was one of his fav. Movies)
He would comment and give his perspective on things.
We would say the lines out loud.
He made it his goal to teach me how to dance. ( he always said a lady needs to know how to do a decent foxtrot )
We did this together until he passed away when I was 23.

I will continue this tradition with my own children.
I think that is the only way to keep it "alive"

a general interest in history does help, i think.


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[LizzieMaine]

But then again that's the American Film Institute, not your garden variety, ballcap worn back to front, cultural neanderthal.

And that list was compiled sixteen years ago, which, in terms of popular culture, was a very very long time ago. I doubt a similar list compiled today would come out quite the same. I suspect 2015 voters would rank George Clooney higher than Clark Gable.

 

[Fading Fast]

As a subcategory of this thread (not worthy of its own thread): From your childhood / teenage years, which cultural icon's eventual decent into cultural obscurity will be most impactful to you (when we are all old doddering men and women)?

For me it would be / will be Elvis and the Rolling Stones (they were mega stars / for decades / impacted society powerfully and beyond just music / well known by people who would never listen to their music / and have, at least to this day, strong recognition across generations forty plus years past their pop-culture peak). If I live long enough to see a day when most of society has no or, at best, a very small knowledge of these entertainers (remember, many who hate them, still know who they are), I will know I am very, very, very old.

And while we are not there yet, I believe that we are getting closer to the day that Frank Sinatra falls into this category. You could feel the marketing machine sputtering as it tried to gin up genuine interest in the 100 anniversary of his birth this year and - IMHO - it only captured minor interest from some people my age (51) and older, but didn't dent the Taylor Swift generation or even have a broad impact in the targeted audience.

 

[2jakes]

Next thing you’re gonna tell me that Santa is dead as well ???

Sheesh !