“Cigarette in the corner of the mouth, raincoat, hat tilted to one side, contemptuous smile, slurred speech, alcohol, revolver, grave-robbing, sex, cool, dead.” There is no need to go on, because from the above it is possible to form a picture of the man whom audiences all over the world recognise as Humphrey Bogart. There is hardly an actor to whom more retrospectives and film series have been dedicated, and no actor in the modern entertainment industry who has achieved such an iconographic presence that has endured for decades. Many have and are still trying to emulate him. They shield the inevitable cigarette with their hand when lighting up, they stuff their fists into the pockets of their too-wide trousers, which they pull up to their peak like Bogart, they don’t button their raincoat but just belt it, and they push their hat askew on their head, stroking the brim as they do so. They are like him, but not identical. No one manages to give such a special emphasis to what is happening as he does with his few words.
A “Bogart man”, or a man who imitates Bogart, is a man from dark or dimly lit rooms and the metropolitan jungle at night. In a rural environment, he looks out of place. Nightclubs and modestly furnished offices are his hunting ground, where he is surrounded by bottles and glasses. When he appears in an unfamiliar place, he quickly assesses the situation. He handles extreme situations with stoic calm. His unerring sense of danger never degenerates into artificial heroism. He is cynical and full of life experience, yet not without a sense of romance and sentimentality, carefully concealed behind a brutal demeanour. He remains an outcast in a world of corruption, but he is no rebel. He has no family and is an individualist, avoiding big words and promises. This is what many who have watched Bogart’s films want to be.
His facial expressions were often stiff. If he laughed, he would only move his lower lip and show a few teeth, his face taking on a wolfish expression. The slightly slurred speech was the result of a hardened scar on his upper lip. It is his facial features that “Bogart” people usually fail to imitate.
A “Bogart man” can, of course, also pilot a plane or drive a tank. As an agent of the state, he pursues villains without mercy or drifts through the Wild West. He knows a thing or two about horses, wrestling and boxing, and sometimes struggles through life as a man without a regular job and a proletarian. Bogart, too, had so many occupations in his 75 films that it is almost impossible to list them.
The way Bogart influenced people’s behaviour on screen became a cult phenomenon in the 1940s, emulated by generations. He once said, “You are a star when even in Karachi they can spell your name.” Bogart’s publications can be measured in metres and his life is the source of many true and untrue anecdotes, exaggerations and lies. Apart from what reliable sources or films can tell us, we do not really know much about him, not least where he got the scar on his upper lip.
Bogart has become so legendary that almost no book can claim to know the “real” Bogart. “Bogart the man and Bogart the hero are so intertwined today that I could not tell how they differ, if they differ at all,” director Peter Bogdanovich once said.
Young Lions of the Salon
Great people do not usually say exactly when they were born. The date of their birth must remain a secret. They turn to astrologers who are supposed to have discovered a particular fateful constellation of stars in their date of birth. In Bogart’s case, the Warner Brothers public relations department discovered a particularly auspicious date for his birth; Christmas Day 1900.
Many a biographer has fallen for this trick, although it is safe to say that Bogart was born on 23 January 1899 in a Manhattan hospital. His parents belonged to the established bourgeoisie of New York. His father, Dr Belmont de Forest Bogart, had studied medicine at the famous Yale University and married Maude Humphrey. The couple were not very wealthy, but the family lived a comfortable bourgeois life. The maid took care of the children, as the parents had no particular affection for the two boys and one girl, and could not agree on how to bring them up. Bogart rarely spoke of his young years afterwards.
His best youthful friend was William Brady Jr, whose father had a fairy-tale career. He rose from shoeshine boy to actor, director, boxing promoter and theatre owner. Bogart and his friends were avid theatre-goers. At school he was nothing special, but later his classmates described him as a timid, frightened little boy who never dared to open his mouth. That is why, years later, they were all the more surprised to see him playing rough types in films.
In 1916, his father sent him to Andover, Massachusetts, to study. There he was to prepare himself properly for the study of medicine. But he was disappointed when, in May 1918, the college told him that his son was not doing very well and could not continue his education. The mother, in particular, was beside herself and immediately told her son that he would now have to fend for himself. Bogart immediately volunteered for the navy and crossed the Atlantic twenty times in a large ocean liner. “The war was all fun and games. Death? What does death mean to an eighteen-year-old? At eighteen, war was a glorious thing. Paris? French women? They were really hot.” But the war was soon over and Bogart was discharged from the army in June 1919.
He later recounted, “I regret that the war had no effect on me. I didn’t know any better than before what I was to become or who I was.” After his discharge, he returned home to his parents and worked occasionally, but he did not last long anywhere. The Roaring Twenties were upon us, with Prohibition, jazz music and gangster fights, but there was still no sign that Humphrey de Forest Bogart would one day become the legendary Bogie.
Not knowing what to do, Bogart thought of his old friend Brady Jr. He introduced him to his father and soon afterwards he went on a theatre tour as a manager on a salary of $50 a week. “I had to watch the money, pay the royalties and rent the furniture.” After the tour, he tried his hand at acting, but his debut was anything but a testament to his talent. He appeared in a mini-role at the Fulton Theatre on Broadway, but struggled to get through two lines of text as a Japanese waiter, dressed in a white gown and holding a tray of glasses. “But my son is really good,” said his father, who was watching the show with friends. The others were silent.
With nothing else to do, Bogart remained loyal to the theatre for many years, appearing in seventeen plays. In 1923, he was cast as a reporter in the comedy Meet the Wife, although he was not considered a talented actor. The play had 232 performances and was considered one of the most successful plays of the 1923/24 season. The critics were very favourable to his performance, and some even praised him highly.
At the time, he presented himself to the audience as a seducer with a rose in his buttonhole, but people got the impression that he was doing nothing clever and behaving like a licked lion of the salon. Far from being seen as a brute, critics compared him to Rudolf Valentino. “He is one of the few Broadway actors who can be classified as a modern-day Valentine, which will of course help him build his career,” they wrote.
But before he made it to the top of the theatre, he married actress Helen Menken at the request of his friend Brady. “If you don’t marry this woman after dating her for so long, you’ll never get a Broadway role again. Helen is too big a star and she will make sure you don’t get cast. And if she doesn’t, her friends will…,” he told him. And Bogart sighed and agreed. The wedding was unusual, as Helen’s parents were mute and the priest was also mute.
The law did not last long. “We argued about the most ridiculous things, like whether we could give a dog caviar while other people were starving,” Bogart later recounted. In 1927, Helen cited mental cruelty as the reason for her divorce, complaining that her husband was beating her. Just a year after the divorce, in April 1928, Bogart married his colleague Mary Philips. A year later, he was calling it Holywood.
He was offered a weekly salary of $750, which was $250 more than he was getting at the theatre, so he quickly decided. The sound film hit the screens and talent scouts on Broadway held numerous test shoots to test the speaking skills of theatre actors. As well as finding Bogart, they found Spencer Tracy, James Cagney and Edward Robinson. The wife, however, refused to leave the theatre and they became a “modern” married couple separated by thousands of miles.
Humphrey Bogart bids farewell to the theatre
His first notable role was in 1923 in A Devil with Women. Again, he played a childless man who walks behind a woman. A few more films followed with similar themes and usually non-starring roles, which did not bring him fame, but during the course of filming he met some of the actors who would later become very famous; Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis. He was very annoyed, however, that some directors gave him so-called “elevator shoes” as essential equipment. These were custom-made, very thick soles that he had to lace onto his shoes to be as tall as his partners. Even when he looked deep into Ingrid Bergman’s eyes in his most famous film, Casablanca, he could only do so with their help.
In fact, it was not a very promising career and in 1932 hardly anyone in Hollywood thought of renewing his contract. His drooling and the scar on his upper lip seemed to the producers to be a serious obstacle to a successful career. He returned to New York and began filming Midnight. Director Chester Erskine offered him the role of a gangster shot by his jilted lover. “In New York, we lived close to each other. Bogart was still playing young roles, so I told him I had a new part for him, a real bad guy. He calmly said it was no problem for him.”
The film was not particularly good and Bogart was disappointed, he felt that the film was not for him. But it was also a time of great economic depression, so many theatres had to close their doors. There were few roles and Bogart was slowly getting too old to play the lions of the salon. As an out-of-work actor, he passed the time by playing chess in various clubs and living off what his wife earned. The first scene in which he appears in the film Casablanca also shows him playing chess.
In 1935, when the play The Petrified Forest was being produced, Bogart was asked to play a brutal gangster leader. He was surprised by the offer, but the producer wanted no one else but him. During rehearsals, his father died. Only now did he realise how much he had loved him and began to realise that he had never told him. So just before his father breathed his last, he leaned over and said, “Dad, I love you.” He must have heard him, because he looked at him and smiled. Then he died.
Bogart played the role superbly at the Broadhurst Theatre at the premiere of The Petrified Forest in January 1935. His days-old beard was a sensation. He shaved it only once a week, after the Saturday performance, because of the play. He earned enough money from the role to pay off all his debts, but it was also his final farewell to the theatre. “I’m not going back to Broadway. There’s too much to do here. I don’t particularly love acting either. It’s boring. I was in the theatre for twelve years. It’s more fun to go to Rome or Africa to shoot a film than to be in New York.”
After the success of The Petrified Forest, it was only a matter of time before a film version was made. Bogart found himself in Hollywood on a weekly salary of $400. The film he starred in stuck to the theatrical story and Bogart, unshaven and with a gun in his hand, played his part. He was cynical, tired, brutal and contemptuous of his film hostages. Finally, he managed to impress the film critics. “Humphrey Bogart once again presents himself as a brilliant, brutal, insecure and sentimental killer.” At the same time, he was nicknamed Bogie.
The film marks a turning point in his career. Warner Brothers signed him to a long-term contract immediately after the film. His Warner Brothers commitments were a coup for him, as he made 28 films between 1936 and 1940, some of which are best forgotten. He spent those four years patiently as number 4 on the so-called “murder’s row” or murder bench. “I was the punching bag for Cagney, Robinson and Raft. In my roles I wore a sort of uniform; blue suit, blue shirt, black or red tie, a hat with the brim pushed down. I always went on dates, but I never got the girl.” As a specialist in hard and stereotypical roles, he was useful for many films.
Asked later if he liked to play the role of a brutal man, he diplomatically replied: ‘When I played gangsters, people thought I was really one of them. I used to get letters from San Quentin. When I switched to detective roles, I started getting letters from San Quentin again, this time from the prisoners asking me how I could have fooled them so much. Apparently, both gangsters and detectives thought I was doing a good job representing them.”
The inflation of gangster films began with the Lex Volstead Act, which introduced Prohibition in 1920. Organised crime was then celebrating its greatest successes, infiltrating almost every aspect of life. Hollywood extended this period into the end of Prohibition in 1933 by supplying audiences with bloody gangster films, in fact, with stories of successful gangsters who were firmly rooted in bourgeois American life.
More importantly, in 1934, the defenders of American values managed to pass the so-called Production Code legislation, under which no gangster was allowed to enjoy the fruits of his crimes on screen. The result was a series of tricks by the film studios to circumvent this censorship. Instead of brutal gangsters, the films now featured brutal and ruthless policemen, who were just as insensitive as the gangsters, paving the way for the insensitive private detectives, whose roles finally put Bogart at the top of the film industry. But he had a long way to go to get there, as Warner Brothers was only slowly coming to the realisation that he might one day be a great actor.
Brutalist on screen and in life
Warner Brothers was the largest and most successful film studio at the time, producing 60 films a year. Films were shot almost on a conveyor belt, and most directors made up to a dozen films each year. In addition, Warner Brothers was one of the first to secure patents for the production of sound films, which gave it a major advantage over other competitors. Unlike some studios which specialised in ‘parlour’ films and comedies, it also took on the subjects that dominated the tabloid press. “Tough guys” like Cagney, Robinson and Bogart were his main players. Robinson and Cagney were also the lead actors in two of the most famous gangster films of the period, Little Caesar (1930) and Enemy of the State (1931).
The Warner brothers (Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack) ran their studio with an iron hand. They usually gave actors seven-year contracts to sign, forcing them to accept every role they were offered. Anyone who disobeyed was suspended and never paid a salary again until they knelt to their dictates. Bogart adapted to these conditions and filmed virtually continuously. “I had barely finished one film before these pigs pushed me into another,” he later said.
An analysis of the films Bogart made during these years shows that more than half of them had gangster or prison themes, and Bogart played hard and unscrupulous criminals. In his private life, Bogart drank heavily and held press conferences. Journalists gratefully noted his caustic remarks and were happy to write about his forays into Hollywood’s pubs and bars. All this reinforced the viewers’ belief that his private life was similar to his on-screen one. “He was a man who worked hard and ridiculed anyone who called him an artist,” Mary Astor, with whom he made his first major film, The Maltese Falcon, in 1941, later said.
Bogart was not allowed to make solo appearances in early gangster films. He always had a group of revolvers around him. Women did not play any important role in these films either. He was simply an actor destined to die in the movies. Nobody dies like Humphrey Bogart is even the title of a poem, and those who were professionally involved in the cinema knew to say that between 1936 and 1940 he was shot twelve times and arrested five times, and twice he died in the electric chair. Nevertheless, unlike Cagney and Robinson, he managed to give his roles a significant and new emphasis in the film world. His strength lay in his threats, which were not accompanied by words but only by tearful intimations.
But the more films he made, the bigger his marital problems became. Mary Philips wanted to go back to Broadway because she saw that there was no bread for her in California. She grabbed the first offer and returned to New York. Bogart was courting and consoling actress Maya Methot, a lush blonde who was getting a divorce. He invited her to his newly bought yacht and then to his apartment, where she stayed until his wife returned from New York. Even then, he refused to give up seeing her, so his wife filed for divorce. In the Puritan America of the time, Bogart could not get out of his embarrassing situation except by marrying his blonde wife in 1938, even though he knew of her bouts of jealousy and excessive drinking.
“Our quarrels were first-class. We were both actors, so it wasn’t difficult to find a reason to argue…” The couple spent the wedding night separately, each sleeping over at their friends’ houses. Their shared villa became the scene of marital strife. Neighbours started complaining about the noise of breaking china and glasses waking them up at night, and the local nightclub even banned them from going in together, so they could only go in separately.
During this time, Bogart was very fond of the bottle. He was worried about his career, but most of all he was bored of playing. He only cut down significantly on his alcohol use when he became really successful. He also had problems with his potency for a while because of psychological problems, the result of marital quarrels. During this time, the director Hawks asked him if he had an erection at all, if he and his wife did not have a fight before they had sex. Bogart thought about it and after a while replied, “You know what? I think you’re right. I probably don’t have one.” But let’s not forget that his wife Mayo was not just a jealous bitch who hindered his career and practically forced him to be a brutal husband. She was also the woman who looked after his sick sister and also his mother, who died in 1940 at the age of 75.
In 1938, he made the film The Oklahoma Kid, which he always considered the low point of his career. In it, he played a quarrelsome saloon owner who is shot by the Oklahoma Kid, played by James Cagney. “Cagney looked like a sponge under a wide-brimmed hat. I was too small to play a cowboy. So they gave me high-heeled shoes and padded my shoulders. I ran around like I was on stilts and felt like a puppet.”
With Virginia City (1940), he finally said goodbye to the Wild West, even if it was a departure fraught with humiliation. He had to play alongside Errol Flynn and Randolph Scott, whom he could not stand. He was also given a moustache and the role of a Mexican mix who spoke with a Mexican accent.
Maltese Falcon
The start of World War II was a difficult time for Hollywood. The studios had to cope with financial losses, especially in foreign markets, and it was only later that cinema-going became a favourite pastime of Americans. No one thought Bogart had a shred of romantic potential. But 1940 was, thanks to chance, an important year for him. Several well-known actors turned down the role of the six-time killer in Decision in the Sierras. Only Bogart, who did not happen to be filming, was willing to accept the role of a killer who escapes from prison with two fellow inmates, first hiding in a hotel and then fleeing into the mountains, where he is shot. Before that, he manages to give money to a peasant family to operate on their sick granddaughter and falls in love with her.
The violent character of the lead actor was softened in the film book with bold sentimental inserts that emphasised the romantic side of the hero without leading the film into cheesy moralising. Despite the film’s great success, the directors were still not convinced that Bogart would become a big film star.
The decision to star in The Maltese Falcon (1941) was, however, almost unanimous. Bogart was so good as Sam Spade that it is impossible to imagine another actor in the role. “His slow, drawn-out speech and tense poise are a perfect match for the role of the private detective,” the New York Herald Tribune reviewed his performance. Cold-blooded, with a deep voice, husky from cigarettes and whisky, he dominated the whole scene. His performance became an example of the typical private detective working on the edge of the law.
The story of the film is quite simple. Sam Spade and his companion are hired by Mrs. Wonderly. After his companion is murdered, Spade pursues a statue of a precious Maltese falcon. He is then suspected of murder, and in order to save himself, he has to explain the case and hand over the murderess to the police, who is none other than Mrs. Wonderly. The Maltese Falcon was actually the beginning of the so-called ‘film noir’, which was to cinema what the blues was to music. This film was the third version of the same story, based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett; the first two were made in 1931 and 1936. It was critically praised and voted Film of the Year by audiences, and Bogart was one of the ten highest paid actors.
The film was very cleverly shot, without dramatic action sequences, with cheeky dialogue full of sadism, cynicism, malice and sexual attraction. Bogart moved in the grey zone between law and crime, breaking definitively away from the stereotypical and naive division between “good guy” and “bad guy”. In the film, he is just as deep and unprincipled as his adversaries and completely lacking in a sense of romance. His declarations of love do not come from the heart. He kisses his employer without tenderness and finally says to her: ‘I hope they don’t hang you, darling, just because of your beautiful neck. I will hand you over. Maybe you’ll get life. That means you’ll be out in twenty years if you behave. I’ll be waiting for you. And if they hang you, I’ll always remember you.”
Barely three months after the premiere of The Maltese Falcon, Pearl Harbor happened. America entered the war and Hollywood watched. “Film noir” had to give way for a few years to patriotic and morally upright works. Cagney and Robinson were somehow not the patriotic, upright types, but Bogart could be convincing as an opponent of the Nazis. The film-makers needed someone as refined and cunning as Goebbels. Warner Brothers was then on the ideological front line with its films, and Bogart was to appear as a new star on all the film fronts, in the Pacific, in Europe, in the Panama Canal and elsewhere. Incidentally, American soldiers were Hollywood’s most loyal customers. In the war year 1943, more than 600,000 soldiers saw Hollywood products every night.
Casablanca
The most classic film of all the classic films of this era is undoubtedly Casablanca. One cannot help but be familiar with it. And anyone who wants to say something new about it definitely does not know what he is talking about.
The pre-story of Casablanca is quite prosaic, and the theatre story was written by a teacher. Warner Brothers paid $20 000 for the copyright. The text had to be reworked, of course, and Ingrid Bergman was cast as the female lead. Other supporting roles were also played by well-known actors. At the beginning, no one was too impressed with Bogart as the main actor. “Who’s going to make out with this devil?” they said.
The story is so familiar that it does not need to be repeated at length. In Casablanca, refugees from all the European countries occupied by Hitler gather in Rick (Bogart)’s café. The black market in passports for Portugal and America is booming. Rick (Bogart), a former fighter for Republican Spain, meets his former love Ilse (Bergman), who wants to go to Portugal with her husband. The cynical Rick, who initially wants to avoid complications, provides the couple with passports. A German major and a French police prefect also get involved. A dramatic finale at the airport ensues, as Ilse and her husband fly to Lisbon and Rick decides to go to the Congo.
Despite the incomplete script, the film was shot in 15 days, which was extremely fast. As a result, the script itself is full of inaccuracies, such as the claim that the Allies invaded Berlin in 1910, and Bogart’s constant drunkenness. For example, one morning he turned up at a film shoot in his pyjamas, drunk and on his bicycle, having been thrown out of the house by his wife.
Casablanca is not just an effective film. Its romantic pathos is powerful, the camera worked flawlessly, immersing the action in soft light and playing with shadows. Bogart was a rugged cynic with a romantic-sentimental streak who gave up great love for patriotism. He himself said of the film: “I worked no differently than I would have worked otherwise. But the scene when the camera turned to Bergman’s face and she said she loved me was really immensely romantic.”
There is no doubt that Casablanca was the cornerstone of the Bogart cult. The film had its world premiere on 27 November 1942, and by the end of the year it was available to American soldiers in remote North Africa. It was not released in cinemas until February 1943, which was a great publicity coup for Warner Brothers, as the release almost coincided with the Allied Conference between Churchill and Roosevelt in Casablanca in January 1943. At the same time, the film also drew a bold parallel between Rick and Roosevelt, as after initial hesitation, they both intervened in the action. Casablanca was nominated for eight Oscars and won three, following its enormous success with audiences. One for directing, one for screenplay and one for best picture in 1943. Bogart did not win this award, having been beaten to it by Paul Lukas, who also starred as an anti-fascist hero in The Watch on the Rhine.
However, the film’s great popularity was overshadowed by problems in his private life. His wife Mayo cut her wrists shortly before the end of Casablanca. Her doctor advised her to undergo emergency treatment in a sanatorium and psychiatric treatment. During the filming of Casablanca, she had already made Bogart’s life a living hell, constantly calling him in the studio, threatening and disturbing him with her jealousy of Ingrid Bergman.
After the success of Casablanca, Bogart had to do his patriotic duty and make a few films, such as Fight in the North Atlantic, Sahara, Ticket to Marseille and To Have and Have Not. In December 1943, with his wife Maya, who had recovered a little, he visited the American troops in North Africa and Italy. On that occasion, he also visited for the first and last time the place that had made him so famous; Casablanca.
During the filming of To Have and Have Not (1944), his marriage finally broke down. His wife complained that he was holding back her career, but in reality she was drinking excessively and, because of her alcoholism, she never got another role. Her chronic suspicions that Bogart was cheating on her with his actresses were substantiated for the first time, because during the making of this film, Bogart met the woman who was in fact the only real partner for this strange man; Lauren Bacall.
Life with Lauren Bacall
Director Howard Hawks was worried about To Have and Have Not, which was to be based on Hemingway’s novel of the same name. He had already chosen the lead actor, Bogart, but was still hesitant about the female lead. By chance, he came across a Harper’s Bazaar magazine with a photograph of an unknown Lauren Bacall. In April 1943, he called her to Hollywood and made some test shots, but he was not sure whether she was the kind of female figure with an almost masculine demeanour who, unlike Bergman, would be able to stand up to Bogart. He was looking for a kind of female Bogart. And he found it in her.
Lauren Bacall – Betty was too common a name – was not at all excited to play with Bogart, a quarter of a century older. “How awful it is to play with that oaf,” she reportedly said. In the film, Bogart plays the cynical captain of a small ship on the island of Martinique, who is careful not to get involved in the conflicts between the supporters of de Gaulle and the collaborationist Vichy regime, but circumstances force him to help a stranded American woman, to get the money for the resistance to safety, and finally to come over to the side of the resistance himself. A happy ending with the American follows.
Bogart quickly befriended Bacall. He was at her shoots and gave her advice, they had lunch together and cycled together. After three weeks, he walked into her dressing room and kissed her. Director Hawks, who had not escaped the affair, advised Bacall: “If you’re smart and you really love him, you’ll keep playing this part.” Officially, he was annoyed and advised her not to go too far, but he could not stop them meeting. He correctly suspected that Bogart’s wife Mayo would also find out about the affair. According to the story, one day she locked Bogart in the bathroom and threatened him with a gun. Bogart tried to get even with her, but to no avail.
In October 1944, the film To Have and Have Not premiered. The newspapers were full of praise for Bacall and her dark voice. Bogart made up his mind quickly, had the divorce under his roof in just ten days, and began to prepare for a new marriage. They married in May 1945 and, although the newspapers said it would not last long, it was considered a model marriage. They lived an almost normal life, not going to parties and reading a lot. The only unpleasant thing that marred their happiness was Bogart’s hair loss due to some hormone treatment. He helped himself to a detested hairpiece and got so used to it that he wore it in public even after his hair had started to grow again.
Lauren Bacall became more and more involved in her role as a housewife, although she was occasionally suspended by the studio for not accepting roles and thus breaching her contract. Bogart was secretly worried about the 25-year gap between them, but consoled himself by saying, “Betty likes older men. She started working at the age of twelve and is therefore familiar with all the difficulties that come with being a young man. That is why she did not want to marry any young man who has to struggle to survive.”
After the great success of To Have and Have Not, Bogart found it difficult to find a suitable role that would not disappoint the audience. Dead Men Sleep Soundly (1945) tried to build on the undisputed success of The Maltese Falcon. It was based on a literary proposal by Raymond Chandler and is still regarded today not only as one of the indispensable relics of Bogart’s cult, but also as one of his best films.
The success of the film is actually hard to understand, as it is a conventional whodunit. Hired to track down a blackmailer, private detective Marlowe (Bogart) gets entangled in a quagmire of crime and immorality with his employer’s two beautiful daughters and barely gets out. Although later actors such as Dick Powell or Robert Mitchum were better as Detective Marlowe because they stuck more closely to Chandler’s script, Bogart’s interpretation is the one that remains most memorable to all.
Marlowe (Bogart) moves without illusions in a microcosm full of corruption and dark deals, cynically interfering and stubbornly persevering in the face of all defeats. The end of the film is typical, with Bogart asking his co-star Bacall: “What’s wrong with you?” And she answers him in a deep voice: “Nothing I can fix for you.” The sarcastic dialogues with Bacall have given Bogart the status of a romantic-erotic hero, who in fact unconsciously despises women. However, the critics were not particularly impressed by Bacall’s performance.
Bogart has become one of the highest paid players. He signed a contract worth $200,000, committing to make one film a year. He was able to turn down two of the three scripts and turned down all the directors in turn. He put aside the bulk of the high fee for harder times. “An actor lives in uncertainty. The money he earns in his good years is not enough to last a lifetime.”
In the summer of 1947, the Bogarts also became politically active. The notorious MacCarthy Senate Committee on Anti-American Activities also turned its tentacles against Hollywood. Famous actors such as Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan and others were particularly active in this committee. In fact, the authorities are said to have discovered ten Communist sympathisers among the scriptwriters. Because they refused to come out and say whether they were Communists, they ended up in prison. At the time, the New York Herald Tribune carried a protest letter from the Committee, which invoked the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of thought to every citizen. Among the signatories of this article were John Ford, Katharine Hepburn, Gregory Peck, John Huston, Billy Wilder, David O. Selznick and, of course, Bogart.
Protesters march on Washington to refute the Senate committee’s claims that Hollywood is controlled by the Communists. Then the communist Daily Worker newspaper ran Bogart’s photo on its front page, and Bogart immediately hit back: ‘I reject communism as much as any decent American. You will not find my name in any Communist organization. I admit that the trip to Washington was foolish. The investigation could have been conducted peacefully and successfully.” John Huston later reproached him for kneeling. Bogart’s excuses that he had a family to care for and feed were hair-brained.
African Queen
In the hot summer of 1947, Bogart was filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with director Huston. Lauren Bacall accompanied her husband into the wilderness, cooked for the whole group and kept them in good spirits. In the film, Bogart plays an unshaven adventurer and gold prospector who is willing to betray even his companions to succeed. The audience was enthusiastic, and Bogart narrowly missed out on an Oscar. Key Largo followed in 1948, the same year Bogart found out he was to become a father. He was not particularly excited, but he was 49 years old at the time. “Fatherhood came a little late. I don’t understand children and they probably don’t understand me.”
In 1950, John Huston called him and started telling him about the script for The African Queen. Together, they found Katharine Hepburn and approached her about working with them. The filming was even more adventurous than the story of the film itself. The filming took place in inaccessible parts of Uganda and the then Belgian Congo. Almost all the members of the 40-strong film crew fell ill, but not Bogart. He claimed that he was cured with whisky and even brushed his teeth with it. The filming was accompanied by a number of inconveniences. The boat on which they were filming nearly burnt down, Hepburn once ran out of an emergency toilet because there was a black mamba in it, and Bogart would obviously have been better off in Paris or at home in his villa.
In the film, he plays the owner of an ancient boat in Central Africa at the outbreak of World War I, who rescues the sister (Hepburn) of a missionary. Together they sail down the river in a boat called the African Queen to save themselves from the invading Germans. On their adventurous journey, the two begin to appreciate each other. Accused of espionage, they are sentenced to death but are married off by the captain of the German ship before their execution. The German ship then hits the wreck of the African Queen and sinks, and the newlyweds are rescued on the shores of a lake.
Bogart won an Oscar for this role. He was too nervous to prepare a long speech, so he contented himself with a few short sentences at the ceremony: ‘It’s a long way from the Belgian Congo to the stage of this auditorium. And it’s better here anyway.” He later admitted: “You can only survive an Oscar if you don’t try to win another one. You know what happens to many Oscar winners. They turn down one script after another and look for a big role to get another Oscar.”
After he got his, he could breathe a sigh of relief. He threw parties that brought together not only actors, but also writers and singers. In his private life, he liked to mingle with intellectuals. He was a man of many opinions and some said that he could even quote Plato. In August 1952, he had a daughter, but this did not encourage him to take a more active role as a father. Lauren Bacall now refused film roles and devoted herself entirely to her family. Bogart, however, had not yet abandoned his Spartan ways. He would get up at half past six in the morning, go to the studio at six and return home late at night. He loved sailing at weekends, but could not get his wife interested in the sport. He also drank less since he married Bacall. “I read that the liver can only digest an ounce of alcohol an hour. So I try to drink less.” In 1952, he was at the height of his popularity, and not even a few bad films threatened that popularity.
Recent years
In 1953, he filmed Mutiny on the Caine. He played the psychopathic Captain Queeg. “At the beginning I played him as a model captain. But when things got tough, I showed the audience how he lost control. I enjoyed it very much. It’s not easy to get a role like that.” Critics later agreed that here he played one of the earliest roles of later psychopaths, one of which came to the fore in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The film We Are Not Angels (1955) was one of his most harrowing, as the renowned comedian Peter Ustinov stole every scene from him. Bogart tried to be a comedian, but he always ended up just being Bogart.
In 1956, he was coughing more and more frequently on the sets and had difficulty swallowing. Tests showed that he had cancer, which had already spread. Nevertheless, he smoked as before. After the operation, his condition steadily deteriorated, so that he became a “loveable skeleton”, as one of his friends put it. His friends visited him every day. He was extremely thin, only his eyes were getting bigger and more frightened. He was always taken to the reception room in a lift, sitting in a wheelchair. He sat there waiting for his two glasses of martinis.
He died on the morning of 14 January 1957. He left a will leaving more than one million dollars. After the funeral ceremony, his body was cremated. More than 3 000 people gathered outside the church, with Gregory Peck, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Danny Kaye, James Mason and others among those invited inside. After a minute’s silence, director John Huston gave a speech: “His was a rich, full life, though not a very long life in years. He had the greatest asset a man can have; talent. Bogart cannot be replaced. There will never be another like him.”
Like every myth, the myth of Bogart aspires to eternity. That his cult after death has far surpassed his popularity in life is surprising to many. Bogart’s popularity, at least on the surface, left him cold: “I don’t give a shit what they write about me. But you can’t stop people from writing what’s in their head.”
