Bogie and Bacall - The Signature Collection: To Have and Have Not/The Big Sleep/Dark Passage/Key La

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

They met on the WB lot. The year was 1944. "I just saw your screen test," Bogart said to Bacall. "I think we're going to have a lot of fun together." And so it began... Listed as the Greatest Male Star of All Time and one the Greatest Female Legends by the American Film Institute, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall star in the all new Bogie & Bacall: The Signature Collection. This giftset includes all four films that starred one of classic Hollywood's noted couples. Box Set is a tremendous savings on all 4 titles.

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 4
• Subtitle: Eng/Fre/Spa/Por/Japanese
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (Pre-1954 Standard)
• Audio: Dolby Digital Mono
• Features:
  • cc

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Won Best Supporting Actress - 1948 (Claire Trevor)

• Library of Congress

•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1997

• National Board of Review

•     Won Best Acting - 1944 (Humphrey Bogart)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Humphrey Bogart - Frank McCloud
       Edward G. Robinson - Johnny Rocco
       Bruce Bennett - Bob
       Agnes Moorehead - Madge Rapf
       Charles D. Brown - Norris, The Butler
       Claire Trevor - Gaye Dawn
       Charles Waldron - General Sternwood
       Rory Mallinson - George Fellsinger
       Harry Lewis - Toots
       Louis Jean Heydt - Joe Brody
       Aldo Nadi - Bodyguard
       John Rodney - Deputy Clyde Sawyer
       Dan Seymour - Angel Garcia
       Pat West - Bartender
       Bob Steele - Canino
       Sir Lancelot - Horatio
       Theodore Von Eltz - Arthur Gwynne Geiger
       Dorothy Malone - Book Seller
       Ben Welden - Pete
       Adrienne D'Ambricourt - Cashier

• Director:

  Howard Hawks, Delmer Daves, John Huston

• Producer:

  Howard Hawks, Jerry Wald

• Screenwriter:

  Leigh Brackett

• Book Author:

  Raymond Chandler

• Screenwriter:

  William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, Delmer Daves

• Book Author:

  David Goodis

• Play Author:

  Maxwell Anderson

• Screenwriter:

  Richard Brooks, John Huston

• Book Author:

  Ernest Hemingway

• Cinematographer:

  Sidney Hickox, Karl W. Freund

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Leo F. Forbstein

• Composer (Music Score):

  Max Steiner, Franz Waxman

• Songwriter:

  Howard Dietz

• Featured Music:

  Ralph Rainger

• Composer (Music Score):

  Leo F. Forbstein

• Editor:

  Christian Nyby, David Weisbart, Rudi Fehr

• Art Director:

  Carl Jules Weyl, Charles H. Clarke, Leo K. Kuter, Charles Novi

• Executive Producer:

  Jack L. Warner

• Set Designer:

  Fred MacLean, William L. Kuehl, Casey Roberts

• Costume Designer:

  Leah Rhoads, Bernard Newman, Milo Anderson

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Robert B. Lee, Dolph Thomas, Oliver S. Garretson

• Makeup:

  Perc Westmore, Wally Westmore

• Special Effects:

  Robert Burks, Roy Davidson, Warren Lynch, H.F. Koenekamp, William McGann, Rex Wimpy

• First Assistant Director:

  Jack Sullivan

REVIEWS:

• A masterful blend of comedy, romance, and action, Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not is filled with the director's signature situations and relationships. The characters could have been lifted from any one of a number of Hawks films: a strong, stoic hero (Humphrey Bogart), a clueless sidekick (Hawks regular Walter Brennan), and a bold, sexually-charged heroine (Lauren Bacall, in her screen debut). A few scenes even recur in the director's other films, such as the classic, post-kiss line, "It's even better when you help." Jules Furthman and William Faulkner loosely adapted the screenplay from an Ernest Hemingway novel; though the setting of To Have is the Caribbean, the characters and Bogart's unselfish transformation is clearly reminiscent of 1942's Casablanca. Hawks would exploit the tremendous chemistry between Bogart and Bacall again in his next film, 1946's The Big Sleep; the two stars married in the interim. ~ Brendon Hanley, Rovi
• Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep is one of the most influential detective movies ever to come out of Hollywood, ranking with John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, which also starred Humphrey Bogart. What makes the film's success astonishing is that it had a troubled post-production history, requiring extensive reshooting, and a script that, in its final version, is so filled with blind alleys and red herrings that no one was exactly sure what the movie was about. The original Raymond Chandler novel had one of that author's more impenetrable plots, with a series of murders that constitute more of a web than a chain, and included key details, involving drug use and pornography, that had to be soft-pedalled in the movie. In the final cut of the film and the final draft of the script, no one ever explains who killed chauffeur Owen Taylor, and it's almost impossible to tell why fully a third of the other killings in the movie took place. Moreover, if it is important to the viewer to know what Arthur Gwynn Geiger is selling out of his bookstore, one has to read the book to find out. Hawks breezed past all of these potential problems by letting the dialogue and the action spill out so fast that one barely had time to acknowledge, much less absorb, a new fact or plot element before the next one was upon the viewer. Where he did slow down was in the fiercely sexual repartee between Bogart's Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall's Mrs. Rutledge, one of the most blatant displays of pre-coital jousting in a mainstream Hollywood movie at that time. The irony, for a movie that was ahead of its time, is that it was nearly two years late getting out to the public, as it was pulled and reshot after initial screenings, increasing Bacall's role, among other changes. The result was a mystery that remained mysterious, but also a cutting-edge movie with a razor-sharp sexual edge. And it turned out that this mattered a lot more than finding out who killed Owen Taylor. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• John Huston's Key Largo 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. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• This sturdy 1947 noir makes great use of its economical script, its San Francisco location shots, and its leads' well-established sexual chemistry. The winding hills, world-famous bridges, and prison proximity of the Bay Area are integral to the story, while the city's non-geographical features (its mixture of affluence and squalor, misfits and money men) provides plenty of fuel for the film's shadowy atmosphere. Humphrey Bogart inhabits his tight-lipped everyman, Vincent Parry, with typical aplomb, even in the first act when he's only a voice. Lauren Bacall, meanwhile, plays it more vulnerable than in To Have and Have Not, her lonely heiress acting out oedipal redemption scenarios that give the real-life couple's unlikely screen pairing more verisimilitude than usual. Character actors Bruce Bennett, Tom D'Andrea, and Houseley Stevenson turn in top-notch work as the friends both new and old who help Parry establish his new identity, while the performer who plays the villain (and will not be disclosed here) does a powerhouse job. Overseen by veteran writer/director Delmer Daves, Dark Passage is a less crowd-pleasing but darkly seductive entry in the Bogie and Bacall canon. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi