August 27 | 32 Movies
Humphrey Bogart arrived in Hollywood before Hollywood knew what to do with his lean good looks and offbeat charm. Twice, in fact. He was one of many Broadway veterans brought West in the early days of sound cinema and he was treated as such. Five years later he was back, reprising his stage role in The Petrified Forest (1936). Yet it took a decade from his big screen debut before he was given the kinds of roles that showcased his talent, his strengths and his gravitas. Maybe the times weren't right until 1940, after a bruising depression and with the threat of another World War on the horizon. Bogart was a new kind of hero, a hard, unsentimental, street smart guy who wore his past on his face, a survivor and a cynic with a romantic heart buried under the scar tissue. In the words of biographers A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax, he was \"tough but compassionate, skeptical but idealistic, betrayed yet ready to believe again.\"
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born on Christmas Day in 1899, the eldest son of a physician father and successful artist mother, and grew up in affluence. To the outside world it appeared a picture perfect childhood—his mother, in fact, immortalized the young Humphrey in numerous drawings used for calendar art and magazine illustrations—but it was an unhappy marriage and his parents showed almost no affection toward him and his two younger sisters. Bogart was well read and smart but a poor student and left school to join the Navy in final days of World War I. The Bogart legend has it that he got his distinctive lisp from shrapnel that scarred his upper lip when his vessel was shelled. That's unlikely—the armistice was signed by the time he saw service—but it makes for a good story. Later surgery removed signs of the scar but the slight lisp remained through his career.
After his service, Bogart ended up on the stage, first as a stage manager and then picking up small roles until he became a fixture on Broadway playing supporting roles and juvenile parts in comedies and melodramas. Parts dried up with the stock market crash of 1929 but Hollywood came calling, looking for a new generation of stars as talking pictures took over. He made his feature debut along with Spencer Tracy in Up the River (1930), a prison comedy directed by John Ford, but while Tracy's star rose, Bogart's roles became smaller in films like Bad Sister (1931) and Three on a Match (1932) and he spent more time back on the Broadway stage. That's where he landed his breakout role: gangster Duke Mantee in “The Petrified Forest” with Leslie Howard, the star of the play and the film. He insisted that Bogart play the part on screen and this time Hollywood took notice. Warner Bros. signed him and Bogart proved himself the consummate professional, an iron man cranking out as many as seven films a year. Most of his roles were supporting parts as thugs, gangsters and sidekicks with the occasional lead in a low-budget production like The Black Legion (1937), a hard-hitting social drama that gave him the chance to show his range.
In San Quentin (1937) he's an inmate who the new, reform-minded warden (Pat O'Brien) thinks is a good case for rehabilitation, an effort almost undone when he discovers that the warden is dating his sister (Ann Sheridan). He got a rare shot at playing one of the good guys in the B-movie Crime School (1938), which costars the Dead End Kids (who Bogart first worked with on Dead End, 1937) and takes the theme of prison reform to reform school. Bogart is back on the other side of the law in another pair of B-movies: Racket Busters (1938), taking top billing as the head of a trucking racket targeted by a crusading attorney (Walter Abel), and King of the Underworld (1939), playing the title role opposite Kay Francis as the physician who gets pulled into the gangster's affairs. The Oklahoma Kid (1939), a rare Western for Bogart, brought him back to more respectable material and a bigger budget, and once again he played the bad guy opposite James Cagney's outlaw with a conscience. Director Vincent Sherman summed up the attitude at Warner Bros.: \"If it's a louse-heel, give it to Bogart.\"
The Return of Doctor X (1939) is surely the oddest credit in Bogart's career. A sequel in name only to the 1932 horror film, it's a strange hybrid of horror movie, newspaper comedy and medical mystery. Even the horror film elements are a curious mix of vampire thriller and Frankenstein tale. Bogart's role was originally offered to Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi before he was assigned to the part. You see why when Bogey makes his entrance, stroking a white rabbit in pure mad scientist mode, his face caked with a pasty pallor and a shock of white running through his black hair.
After years of playing second fiddle to the likes of James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft, Bogey landed the role that would showcase the talent and the persona that would elevate him to stardom. He didn't get top billing in High Sierra (1941), which went to costar Ida Lupino, but he is unquestionably the star and he carries the film with a mix of cynical survivalism, criminal loyalty and weary resignation. Screenwriter John Huston saw his potential and insisted that Bogart play the lead in his directorial debut.
The Maltese Falcon (1941) was the third adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's detective novel classic but the first film to capture the story's tough attitude and the vivid viper's nest of double-dealing thugs and con artists on the trail of a treasure like junkies chasing the ultimate fix. But it all rests on Bogart's incarnation of Sam Spade as the original hardboiled private detective, a mercenary with a code of ethics just slightly less vicious than characters he keeps company with. He played variations of this character numerous times in his career, epitomized in his defining role as the wounded cynic in Casablanca (1942). It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Hollywood and Bogart: Casablanca was a runaway hit and took home the Academy Award for best picture while Bogart earned his first Oscar nomination.
Hollywood threw itself into the war effort after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Bogart, now over 40 and too old to enlist, did his part onscreen in war dramas like Action in the North Atlantic (1943), Sahara (1943) and Passage to Marseille (1944). The latter reunited Bogart with Casablanca director Michael Curtiz and co-stars Claude Rains, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet.
During it all, Bogart's personal life was strained to the breaking point thanks to a toxic marriage to actress Mayo Methot. Their passions (and their drinking) fueled such a combative relationship that Hollywood had a nickname for them: the Battling Bogarts. It all came to a head during the production of To Have and Have Not (1944), where Bogart fell in love with Lauren Bacall, a 19-year-old model making her big screen debut. They sizzle from their first shared scene, the flinty loner and the sexy tough girl who burns her presence on the screen, and a few weeks into production the sparks onscreen bled into real life. It was the beginning of one of Hollywood’s greatest love affairs and the end of Bogart's marriage to Methot. Hawks immediately reteamed the couple, who married immediately after Bogart's divorce came through, in The Big Sleep (1946) with Bogey as the screen’s smoothest (and most charmingly insolent) Philip Marlowe. After seeing Bogart play the hero he created, author Raymond Chandler proclaimed him \"tough without a gun…. All he had to do to dominate a scene was to enter it.\"
But Bogart didn't just play heroes. A pair of film noir thrillers cast him as a darkly handsome lady killer who murders his wives to replace them with a younger model. The studio pressured him into making Conflict (1945), a thriller with a psychological twist and a shadowy film noir style, and despite Bogart's misgivings he creates a character for more unstable and unpredictable than his early gangster portrayals. Two years later he was as an American painter in Scotland who poisons his wife to marry another woman (Barbara Stanwyck) in The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), only to see his passions cool when he meets a new beauty. Both films, coincidentally, costar Alexis Smith as the younger woman he desires.
Bogey and Bacall starred together again in Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948), the final screen pairing for the couple. It also reunited Bogart with director John Huston and actor Edward G. Robinson. After playing second fiddle to Robinson in so many films, Bogart takes the lead as a disillusioned World War II vet while Robinson is the flamboyant gangster in exile, bringing his Little Caesar (1931) character to a world where his kind of mobster no longer has a place. That same year, Huston directed Bogart in one the actor's most acclaimed roles: Fred C. Dobbs, the down-on-his-luck American who strikes gold in Mexico and becomes blinded by greed, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Critics across the country proclaimed it the performance of Bogart's career yet, while it became the second Bogart picture to win the Academy Award for best picture, he didn’t even receive a nomination.
The arrival of the jet age put Bogart in the cockpit as a test pilot of an experimental plane in Chain Lightning (1950), which was one of the actor's last films for Warner Bros., his home studio for the past 14 years. Fed up with lackluster assignments, he had formed Santana Productions with producer Robert Lord to develop his own projects, including Knock on Any Door (1949), Tokyo Joe (1949), and In a Lonely Place (1950), which gave Bogart one of his most complex roles. In a career of hard-edged characters and violent anti-heroes, none are as damaged and dark as Dixon Steele, the volatile, hard-drinking Hollywood screenwriter who becomes a murder suspect thanks to his cynical attitude and his fierce temper. He had hoped to star with Bacall but she was still under contract to Warner Bros. and the studio refused the loan out. Gloria Grahame, the wife of director Nicholas Ray, was cast opposite Bogart, giving one of the finest performances of her career. While the film was a box office disappointment, it was celebrated by critics and has since been embraced as a film noir classic.
Bogart earned his first and only Academy Award for The African Queen (1952), playing hard drinking riverboat captain Charlie Allnutt opposite Katharine Hepburn's prim and proper missionary in an adventure that pits them against the Germans in East Africa in World War I. He received one last nomination playing World War II supply ship commander in The Caine Mutiny (1954). These two films offered the veteran new challenges after a decade of playing variations on his hardboiled persona. He never stopped pushing for interesting roles.
Bogart was diagnosed with cancer in 1956. He underwent surgery and chemotherapy but the cancer had spread and the years of drinking and smoking had taken its toll. He died in early 1957, just weeks after turning 57. His legacy lived on, however, perhaps more than any other actor of his generation. He's the ideal that Jean-Paul Belmondo's cheap hood models himself on in the French New Wave classic Breathless (1960), the new generation tipping its hat to past heroes. His picture adorned college dorm rooms and his films were staples on TV and in repertory houses through the end the 20th Century. Bogey in a trench coat and a fedora became the iconic image of the Hollywood hero of the 1940s and 1950s, the tough guy with a sense of honor. He gave us heroes we could believe in.
