The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (44 page)

His work grew less frequent, as if middle age and a wish to be discriminating had stranded an unusual personality:
Permission to Kill
(75, Cyril Frankel); caustic and quivering with affronted etiquette as the bitchy lawyer in
Providence
(77, Alain Resnais); harking back to blithe war heroes in
A Bridge Too Far
(77, Richard Attenborough); and
Despair
(78, Rainer Werner Fassbinder).

In the eighties, he was semiretired, giving most of his time to writing novels, but he appeared on TV as Roald Dahl in
The Patricia Neal Story
(81, Anthony Harvey and Anthony Page); in
The Vision
(87, Norman Stone); and in
Daddy Nostalgie
(90, Bertrand Tavernier).

Two years after his death, Arena did a wonderful, pained documentary that showed how repressed and denying he had been until the end. It made his achievement feel greater, even if Bogarde the man was harder to like.

Humphrey Bogart
(1899–1957), b. New York
“Bogie,” sighs Belmondo at the beginning of
Breathless
, and the link was made between the Bogart of the 1940s and the anarchist, behaviorist hero of the 1960s. It was the start of a cult, especially among those too young to have seen Bogart’s best movies when they were first released. A generation coming of age at a time of presidential assassination, cold war, international conspiracy, man-made pollution, the remorseless spread of corruption, and the ever darker threat of man’s aptitude for self-destruction, claimed for itself the sardonic pessimism, the neutrality, and the unfailing honor of the Bogart character. Trotskyists adorned their walls with portraits of Bogart in
In a Lonely Place
and young rakes muttered all the acidities of
The Big Sleep
, unaware that they came from Raymond Chandler’s original. Underlying everything was the idea that Bogart had been honest, truthful, and that he looked chaos in the eye, that he knew the odds and was the only reliable companion in the night. Which is nonsense and probably only possible if Bogart took something like the same view of his work in the cinema. It is time for a reappraisal, and while Bogart is often very close to the illusory heart of movies, by the highest standards—Grant, Stewart, Mitchum—he is a limited actor, not quite honest enough with himself.

“How can a man so ugly be so handsome?” asks Marta Toren of Bogart in
Sirocco
. Perhaps only if that man has a high enough regard for himself. That means several things: the sort of insistence Hemingway made that a man be true to himself; the implication that there is no other criterion; disenchantment with most of the world’s white lies; a certain blindness to some of the larger deceptions; a sense of intellectual isolation such as displayed and sheltered the private eyes of the 1930s and 1940s; a belief in another Hemingway ideal, of grace under pressure; and, with this last, the constant necessity to observe oneself, to take care that weakness never shows, and that the line of behavior retains style and elegance. Give such a man the best material—Hammett and Chandler, for instance—and allow him to act it out in movies, and it is no wonder that the detachment of the character begins to clash with self-regard. If millions go to the movies to persuade themselves that they are Humphrey Bogart, why should Bogart himself not share in the illusion?

This last trap is the greatest test of stars in the cinema and Bogart falls heavily into it. In that respect, it is worth noticing that he had had a rougher passage to success than many latter-day admirers might think. After navy service in the First World War, Bogart took to stage acting, playing handsome romantic leads. Louise Brooks met him in 1924, and said he was a “Humphrey” then—“a slim boy with charming manners.” He was from the upper classes, and he usually played young men who asked girls for tennis.

In 1930 he was contracted by Fox and made
A Devil With Women
(Irving Cummings). He stayed at Fox two years and was in John Ford’s
Up the River
(30) and Raoul Walsh’s
Women of All Nations
(31) before the studio let him go. For the next few years he alternated between Broadway and Hollywood, appearing in two Joan Blondell/Mervyn Le Roy films at Warners—
Big City Blues
(32) and
Three on a Match
(32)—and playing Duke Mantee in the New York production of Robert Sherwood’s
The Petrified Forest
. When that ossified play was filmed, in 1936, its star, Leslie Howard, insisted that Bogart play Mantee. It is often known as Bogart’s breakthrough; but it is an appalling film and Bogart is dreadful in it. For, although it may have persuaded Warners to use him further as a ruthless, cruel hoodlum, Bogart was incapable of bringing character or conviction to such a part. By contrast, Cagney and Robinson made the gangster vivid and credible. The classic instance of Bogart’s failure is in Raoul Walsh’s
The Roaring Twenties
(39) in which a supposedly malicious Bogart is called upon to cringe and howl for his life to be spared. But he cannot admit cowardice and his writhing is embarrassingly inept. In part, this is sheer technical limitation, such as mars his Irish groom in the Bette Davis/Edmund Goulding
Dark Victory
(39). But, more seriously, Bogart could not bring himself to portray loathsomeness with any imaginative honesty. Thus, the string of parts in the late 1930s as a convict or gangster are generally unconvincing, and for all Bogart’s complaint at the way Warners made him play second fiddle to Cagney, Robinson, and Raft, he does not appear to have identified his own problem:
Bullets or Ballots
(36, William Keighley);
The Great O’Malley
(37, William Dieterle);
San Quentin
(37, Lloyd Bacon); as a district attorney in
Marked Woman
(37, Bacon);
Kid Galahad
(37, Michael Curtiz);
Dead End
(37, William Wyler);
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse
(38, Anatole Litvak);
The Oklahoma Kid
(39, Bacon);
Angels With Dirty Faces
(39, Curtiz);
Invisible Stripes
(39, Bacon);
It All Came True
(40, Lewis Seiler);
Brother Orchid
(40, Bacon); and
They Drive By Night
(40, Raoul Walsh).

Perhaps Raoul Walsh had detected the barrier in Bogart’s work. For in 1941, they made the film that is the turning point in the actor’s career,
High Sierra
, about an ex-convict driven toward inevitable destruction. Bogart was immediately at ease, sympathetic, and affecting as the lonely, self-sufficient, middle-aged man, aware of the fate that awaits him. He managed to suggest that this outsider was confronted with all the hostile and inhumane forces of the world; crime was offered as an existential gesture. He was detached from everything except his own standards and his reluctant feelings for Ida Lupino. In part, he expressed the stoicism with which a frightened man might equip himself for war. But, most richly, the part pushed Bogart back on his own resources and brought out wit, a greater gentleness, and a grudging humanity—it was as if the world had at last recognized the person he always believed himself to be. This character was nudged on with his rather hurried Sam Spade in
The Maltese Falcon
(41), a film that owes very little to its director, John Huston, and more to Hammett’s original conception and to the background cast of Sydney Greenstreet, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook. In 1943, the bittersweet romanticism was perfectly embodied in Michael Curtiz’s
Casablanca
, a woman’s picture for men and the sort of unblinking tosh, set deep in never-never land, that is the essence of Hollywood. The most surprising thing today about
Casablanca
is its scene of drunken self-pity, proof of how far Bogart needed a great artist to help him rise above the level of maudlin resentment. Curtiz handles
Casablanca
with great aplomb, but he never tries to disturb the attitudinizing characters.

Then in 1944 Bogart met Howard Hawks and Lauren Bacall: together they made
To Have and Have Not
(44) and
The Big Sleep
(46). These are masterpieces, belonging to Hawks rather than to Bogart. Even so, the company warmed Bogart and if the scenes with Bacall are improved by the real feeling between them, that is only to ask what makes feelings real. For the idea of Bogart was later greatly enhanced by the way he had met his true (and fourth) love on a soundstage. These two films are mature, where
Casablanca
is a wet dream, because of the way Hawks turns thrillers into comedies. It is to Bogart’s credit that he seems not only aware of this trick but a prime agent in it. Thus, they work on two levels: as beautiful fantasies and as commentaries by the participants on their very absurdity.

It was the high point of his career. Indeed, conventional thrillers—like
Conflict
(45, Curtis Bernhardt);
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
(47, Peter Godfrey);
Dead Reckoning
(47, John Cromwell);
Dark Passage
(47, Delmer Daves);
Key Largo
(48, Huston)—could hardly have the same urgency after
The Big Sleep
(by definition, the fullest immersion in the dream).
Dead Reckoning
is actually the first parody of the Bogart manner, with him muttering “Geronimo” at every crisis to the patently fake Lizabeth Scott. But in his last ten years Bogart played three parts that were clearly difficult and that involved a deliberate inspection of his own divided personality. Two of these are in glib films:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(48, Huston) and
The Caine Mutiny
(54, Edward Dmytryk), but the other is in Nicholas Ray’s marvelous
In a Lonely Place
(50). This last penetrates the toughness that Bogart so often assumed and reaches an intractable malevolence that is more frightening than any of his gangsters. In
Treasure
and
Caine
he plays suspicious, paranoid men whose characters are torn apart by working at different levels. His Queeg especially, made when he was already ill with cancer, is very moving.
In a Lonely Place
was made by Bogart’s own production company, Santana, for whom he made three other movies: Ray’s more conventional
Knock on Any Door
(49),
Tokyo Joe
(49, Stuart Heisler), and
Sirocco
(51, Curtis Bernhardt). Instead of for
Lonely Place
, he received his Oscar for Huston’s
The African Queen
(51), a sentimental gesture to an offbeat role.
The Enforcer
(51, Bretaigne Windust and Walsh) was a clever throwback to Warners’ films of the 1930s.
Beat the Devil
(54, Huston) was an insouciant parody in which Bogart (the coproducer) has little idea of what is going on. He was poor in two Richard Brooks films,
Deadline U.S.A
. (52) and
Battle Circus
(53), and not very funny in the comedy of
Sabrina
(54, Billy Wilder). But he was back to the sourness of
Casablanca
in Mankiewicz’s
Barefoot Contessa
(54), a shameless reworking of earlier moods. His final films were sadly unworthy of him:
We’re No Angels
(55, Curtiz);
The Desperate Hours
(55, Wyler);
The Left Hand of God
(55, Dmytryk); and
The Harder They Fall
(56, Mark Robson).

Bogart’s work is complex and central to the issue of identification in the cinema. He made few wholly satisfactory films—
High Sierra, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place
—and failed in a variety of parts outside the narrow range he saw fit for himself. But within that range he had the impact of Garbo or James Dean. Like them, he was a great Romantic. It is harder to see him as such because of the efforts he made to appear anti-Romantic. The implications of his work—as a comment on self-dramatization—are rather more daunting and disturbing than he ever realized.

Peter Bogdanovich
, b. Kingston, New York, 1939
1968:
Targets
. 1971:
The Last Picture Show
. 1972:
What’s Up, Doc?
. 1973:
Paper Moon
. 1974:
Daisy Miller
. 1975:
At Long Last Love
. 1976:
Nickelodeon
. 1979:
Saint Jack
. 1983:
They All Laughed
. 1985:
Mask
. 1988:
Illegally Yours
. 1990:
Texasville
. 1992:
Noises Off
. 1993:
The Thing Called Love; Fallen Angels
(TV). 1996:
To Sir With Love 2
(TV). 1997:
The Price of Heaven
(TV);
Rescuers: Stories of Courage: Two Women
(TV). 1998:
Naked City: A Killer Christmas
(TV). 1999:
A Saintly Switch
(TV). 2002:
The Cat’s Meow
. 2004:
The Mystery of Natalie Wood
(TV);
Hustle
(TV);
The Sopranos
(TV). 2007:
Running Down a Dream
(d).

It is a French pattern—if a relatively recent one—for critics to badger their way into making films of their own. Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette all took that course. But in the American cinema it is barely known. Only Susan Sontag springs to mind as a companion to Bogdanovich, and her films have been made under very different conditions, just as her writing on films was more obscure than his. The rigid barriers between criticism and direction are worth pointing out. In the early 1970s battle over who did what on
Citizen Kane
, it was the literary bias of critic Pauline Kael that put her in Herman Mankiewicz’s corner, while Bogdanovich knew that Welles colored everything in all his films, if only because
Kane
is based on Welles himself. In that sense, Bogdanovich was a valuable, French-inspired critic who insisted on the director as auteur, so much so that many Americans began to take directors more seriously because of what he wrote. In particular, he threw attention onto Hawks, Lang, and Allan Dwan with long, respectful interviews. As a director, Bogdanovich made four lovely picture shows, revealing marvelous accomplishment, wit, and sense of place. But, ironically, they are less an auteur’s films than the extension of criticism.
Targets
—made under Roger Corman’s aegis, after Bogdanovich had fueled the bikes for
Wild Angels
—is a tribute to AIP horror pictures, to Boris Karloff, and to Hawks, and also a stylistic nod in the direction of Hitchcock and Lang. That it works so well in mixing a story of a veteran horror actor with a survey of an all-American bourgeois killer is because of vigorous conception and first-class mise-en-scène at the drive-in cinema.