Bogie and Bacall look off-colour

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 11 AUGUST 2002

AND SO THAT’S how Ally McBeal ended – not with a bang, but with a whimper. Come to think of it, that’s also how Ally McBeal started – and carried on. Still, we have now seen the last episode, and a good thing too. No more pouting, no more hair-twiddling as a substitute for acting, no more of Vonda Shepard’s theme song for the 1990s, “I’ve been searching my soul tonight”.

Searching your soul is unseemly. You never find anything useful there – the car keys are generally between the couch cushions, and your parking ticket will not be found, no matter where you look. When you do put in a thorough search, standing at the parking payment machine with a small sea of plastic shopping bags around your feet, and you finally emerge with a parking ticket, like a happy gannet bobbing up with a pilchard in its beak, it is always the parking ticket you lost the last time you were at the mall. Where was it three days ago when you needed it? Where has it been in the interim? Ah, my friends, these are life’s ineffable mysteries. You may as well ask why the caged bird sings, or how many roads a man must walk down before you can call him a cab.

Humphrey Bogart never searched his soul, or if he did, he had more class than to do it in public. That is one of the many reasons I am so fond of him. Bogart is a reminder of a better time; a cleaner, stronger, nobler time, when male movie stars were men, not pretty boys with expensive haircuts and bellies rippling like traffic calming zones. When life dealt Bogart the blows it deals us all – true loves arriving in our gin-joint with a new man on their arm; strange hoodlums socking us on the jaw when we least expect it – he responded as men should respond: with bourbon and a cigarette and a quiet determination not to let it happen again.

Bogart was not simple. He was not emotionless as Stallone or Steven Seagal or other modern so-called tough guys are emotionless. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and Rick in Casablanca were troubled, sensitive beasts, prone to brooding and hurting and – in the scenes off-camera, solitary tears. The difference is that they didn’t expect applause for being sensitive. They decided what had to be done, and they did it and bore the consequences like – if the Women’s Day activists will forgive me – like men.

The Humphrey Bogart festival started on e.tv this week, and I settled in front of the The Big Sleep (e.tv, Monday, 10.15pm) as excited as a kitten. The Big Sleep was co-written by William Faulkner. The plot line is more prolix than Faulkner’s novels, but fortunately the sentences are shorter. Bogart carried a gun, but his most effective weapon is the snub-nosed sentence, delivered like a poker dealer delivers a card: “Have you met Miss Sternwood?” asks the butler. Bogart’s face is impassive.

“Yes,” he says, “she tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up.”

Later the supernaturally lovely Lauren Bacall loses her temper and flies at Bogart. He catches her wrist. “Careful,” he says, without any inflection. “I don’t slap around so good, this time of evening.”

Bogart was so hard-boiled he hardly spoke the way other men speak. He seemed to hold his lower jaw immobile and move his upper jaw up and down. He specialised in playing lonely men toughing it out in a world of shadow and deceit, a world of pasteboard masks and moving scenery that conceal corruption and betrayal and death. And down these mean streets he stays true to his code of honour and tortured sense of duty. But scarcely had I started watching The Big Sleep when I realised that Bogart was up against a whole new threat.

The Big Sleep had been colourised. Some poor schlub in Ted Turner’s diabolical workshop sat with digital paintbrush and pen and coloured in the black-and-white print, so that Bogart floated across the screen in lurid shades of newly peeled pink, like a hard-boiled lobster. It was awful. The point of film noir is that the hero wanders a world of black and white, in which nothing is black or white but washed with shades of moral ambiguity. The only thing ambiguous about the colourised print was the actual colour of Bogart’s trench coat.

In the original it is an appropriate shade of slate; colourised, it suddenly took on precisely the mustard shade of Inspector Clouseau’s coat. It was disconcerting to be half-expecting Philip Marlowe to ask people if they had a minkey. Fortunately, halfway through a scene the colourisers had a change of heart, or perhaps they ran out of mustard crayons, and the trench coat subtly metamorphosed to a queasy shade of green.

Precisely how aesthetically destitute would you have to be to prefer the colourised version? Ted Turner defended the process by claiming that the renovated prints would attract new generations to the films. This is something like painting bigger breasts on the Mona Lisa in order to bring her in line with contemporary tastes and draw a younger crowd to the Louvre.

I don’t think I can bring myself to watch the other films in the Bogart festival. I love them too much to see them painted and peddled like tuppenny tarts. I will certainly not be watching a colourised Casablanca. There are few things that are sacred to me, but Ingrid Bergman’s white dress is one of them. If I see her on that runway in shades of lilac or bottle green, I’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon; and for the rest of my life. Here’s not looking at you, kid.