Films featuring
Humphrey Bogart

The African Queen

John Huston’s classic film had the unusual distinction of being the last film from the American Film Institute’s 100 Years, 100 Movies list to appear on DVD in the United States, not bowing on that format until March of 2010, well into the Blu-ray/Netflix streaming era. You could find it overseas, but only if you had a “region-free” player, and those copies were made from prints that were, to be polite, pieces of mule dung. Yeah, you should have heard the less polite version of that sentence.

Having seen Paramount’s new release, on Blu-ray of course, I have to say it was worth waiting for the studio to sort out who had the rights to The African Queen, find a half-way decent copy, and then take the time to restore the film to something quite near its original glory.

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The Maltese Falcon

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Plato believed that everything in the world has an “ideal universal form” that represents the perfect example of the imperfect things in the real world. For many, The Maltese Falcon is the Platonic ideal of the hard-boiled detective story. True, it’s not the earliest example of the genre, the original novel already having been adapted twice for the screen in the previous decade, but it still contains classic examples of what we consider the basic elements of that genre of film. Most of would now be tired clichés of detective films were either established or popularized by this classic version of Dashiell Hammet’s novel.

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