Recently re-released in glorious 4K (nope, I couldn't tell the difference, either) but, hey - any excuse to see this wonderful crime noir on a big screen again is OK with me. When "Brigid" (Mary Astor) approaches PI "Sam Spade" (Humphrey Bogart) and his partner "Archer" (Jerome Cowan) with a dodgy sounding story about her sister being kidnapped by her older lover, they don't believe a word of it - but $200 (and a bit of a shine to the lady from "Archer") gets them to go through the motions. Well: they were right about one thing - her story was riddled with holes, but not so many as "Archer" becomes, and soon "Spade" and the police are trying to track down/avoid the murderer whilst trying to establish some sort of motive. Enter the stars of the film, for me, anyway - the uber-sleazy "Joel Cairo" (Peter Lorre) and "Gutman" (Sydney Greenstreet), the avuncular gentleman who has most of the pieces of the puzzle and who is as dangerous and devious as he is charming and disarming... Will "Spade" get to the bottom of the mystery before he ends up brown bread? That's where the film falls down a bit - there is precious little jeopardy to the plot; indeed the last fifteen or twenty minutes are just a little disappointing - rushed even. Bogey is superb in the part, though - his portrayal reeks of a wonderful cynic, a seen-it-all-before ground down sort of man who takes his first drink of the day from the same glass he took his last from the day before and Astor is efficient, though not terribly engaging, as the lynchpin upon which much of the film depends. It's 80 years old now - and I still think the use of a strong score from Adolph Deutsch, some wonderfully evocative lighting and effects (it rains quite a lot!) and, of course, a strong cast with a good story, takes some beating.
