Bogie, Candy and Me

by Richard Armstrong

Candy Minter introduced me to the love of my life. In the summer of 1977 I had had a brief, purely academic fling with Candy from Mortgages and Loans fueled, I since suspect, by too much Casablanca on August Bank Holiday weekend. Not that we exchanged sighs and recriminations or parted tearfully at the airport (there wasn't one in our little town). No, our "thing" involved my becoming engrossed in the film on Sunday afternoon while bank holiday rain pelted at the window, projecting on the then object of my affection, and spending the best part of Monday afternoon walking to her house through another downpour. Having got there, I turned around after a few minutes of sopping deliberation, and came home.

Earlier that week, I had followed Candy home from work. It seemed strange to me that this small girl walking quietly home to her tea was the same bobbed and confident young woman whom I had longed for since she started in Mortgages and Loans, and whom my colleagues would surreptitiously learn to touch in the months to come. Casablanca was a feast accompanied by peanut butter sandwiches and mugs of coffee. I was besotted with the cosmopolitanism of it all. The film was steeped in the furtive, passionate and dangerous ambience of a war that had fascinated me as a boy and was here peopled by a polyglot coterie of Continental romantics and a hard-nosed American whose work would have a profound effect on me. All mired in the souks and propellor-fanned lobbies of a North Africa dipped in French sauce. It is hard not to see Casablanca as a metaphor for the exotic commissaries of '40s Hollywood. Seeing Candy at work the following Tuesday, and pursued by rumours of a dogsbody's rain-swept odyssey, it was becoming hard not to see the office where I worked as a city of strangers.

I daresay my "Bogie" phase began at about that time. Around October, I caught Play it Again, Sam on TV and revelled in a sensibility I realized I knew well. One morning during the run-up to Christmas, my mother had the radio on and I recognized the tinkle of Dooley Wilson's piano again. As Time Goes By was being re-released. Later that week, I rushed out to buy it. Christmas 1977 saw a TV screening of The Big Sleep. But pleased as I was by Bogart and Bacall's smouldering byplay, I was vexed at being unable to figure out the plot. After all, any ardent Bogart fan should have been able to figure out the plots of his films at the very least. What I was painfully coming to realize was that it was possible to take witty repartee and piquant supporting turns from a movie without necessarily knowing how the whole fits together. Just as it was possible to get a buzz from talking to her during a coffee break without knowing whether or not this is where happiness lay. It was a singular moment in my education. The cinema is a broad church, admitting not simply a multitude of disciples but a multitude of reasons to worship at the same screening. I subsequently discovered that director Howard Hawks and the screenwriters were themselves as puzzled by The Big Sleep in 1946 as I had been in 1977. As with Candy Minter, I knew the parts off by heart, even though I never discovered how the whole thing ticked.

Copyright © Richard Armstrong 2003