Bruce Beckham's Blog - Posts Tagged "humphrey-bogart"
To see, or not to see?
Should an author describe the visual appearance of a character? It’s a fascinating conundrum.
Right now I’m reading The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett – its protagonist in the eponymous 1941 movie famously portrayed by Humphrey Bogart.
The book opens with this paragraph:
“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down – from high flat temples – in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.”
It’s a compelling description, but rather less Bogart and more DiCaprio, I’d venture.
Now, the novel was published a good decade before the movie was released, and I don’t imagine Hammet foresaw its meteoric trajectory nor its enduring longevity.
I’m glad to say I have not seen the film (though I now shall seek it out) – but the mere knowledge of Bogart’s starring role has been enough to keep me hallucinating inaccurately as I read the text!
More prosaically, in the first Inspector Morse novel, Last Book to Woodstock, the yet-to-be-famous detective is described as being younger than his sidekick, Lewis, and physically very unlike his subsequent small-screen impersonator, John Thaw.
Of course, the Bond franchise has trained us to expect a continual morphing of the leading actor, and you could argue it’s an irrelevance in a world that is – after all – entirely fantasy.
However, on the other side of the coin – as far as novels are concerned – is the reader who is comfortable with their own visualization of characters. And, some would say, this is central to the pleasure of reading, indeed the very essence of the imagination that is aroused by the author’s gentle stimulus.
Right now I’m reading The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett – its protagonist in the eponymous 1941 movie famously portrayed by Humphrey Bogart.
The book opens with this paragraph:
“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down – from high flat temples – in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.”
It’s a compelling description, but rather less Bogart and more DiCaprio, I’d venture.
Now, the novel was published a good decade before the movie was released, and I don’t imagine Hammet foresaw its meteoric trajectory nor its enduring longevity.
I’m glad to say I have not seen the film (though I now shall seek it out) – but the mere knowledge of Bogart’s starring role has been enough to keep me hallucinating inaccurately as I read the text!
More prosaically, in the first Inspector Morse novel, Last Book to Woodstock, the yet-to-be-famous detective is described as being younger than his sidekick, Lewis, and physically very unlike his subsequent small-screen impersonator, John Thaw.
Of course, the Bond franchise has trained us to expect a continual morphing of the leading actor, and you could argue it’s an irrelevance in a world that is – after all – entirely fantasy.
However, on the other side of the coin – as far as novels are concerned – is the reader who is comfortable with their own visualization of characters. And, some would say, this is central to the pleasure of reading, indeed the very essence of the imagination that is aroused by the author’s gentle stimulus.
