From 1941 to 1953, director John Huston and actor Humphrey Bogart made one classic film after another, from The Maltese Falcon to The African Queen. Here is the story of their close but combative friendship.
Little of this is news—in fact I couldn’t find a single anecdote or quote in the book that Segaloff hadn’t sourced from one of the many biographies of the men ... A papier-mâché mummy of secondary sources, rewritten in a style that makes the mistake of trying to sound hardboiled ... Segaloff fails to zero in on what should have been the heart of the book: the role the men played in each other’s fantasy lives ... Plodding ... Tedious.
A dry recitation of details ... We learn only what fans of Bogart and Huston already know ... This is not to say that Bogart and Huston is without its bright spots. It doubles as a competent-enough introduction to the studio system that dominated early Hollywood, and it contains a wealth of amusing (if familiar) details ... But some of the pleasure that these stories might otherwise afford is dulled by the prose, which is frequently clunky and stilted ... Worst of all, Bogart and Huston leaves the central question untouched ... There are pages of plodding plot summary, largely unenlivened by commentary or reflection. After the procession of facts, we are no closer to understanding what made these movies so good.
