Bogart, Humphrey

BOGART, Humphrey

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Nationality: American. Born: Humphrey DeForest Bogart in New York City, 23 January 1899. Education: Attended Trinity School, New York; expelled from Philips Academy, Andover, Massachussetts. Family: Married 1) Helen Menken, 1926 (divorced 1927); 2) Mary Philips, 1928 (divorced 1938); 3) Mayo Methot, 1938 (divorced 1945); 4) the actress Lauren Bacall, 1945, son: Stephen Humphrey, daughter: Leslie Howard. Career: 1918–19—served in U.S. Navy; 1920–22—managed stage company owned by William S. Brady; performed various chores at Brady's New York film studio; 1922—began acting regularly on stage; 1930—film debut in short Broadway's Like That ; 1930–35—minor film roles for various studios while continuing to work on stage; 1936—success of film version of The Petrified Forest led to long-term contract with Warner Brothers; 1947—protested against HUAC activities with actress wife Lauren Bacall and other celebrities. Awards: Best Actor Academy Award, for The African Queen, 1951. Died: Of cancer, in Hollywood, California, 14 January 1957.

Films as Actor:

1930

Broadway's Like That (Roth—short); Up the River (John Ford) (as Steve); A Devil with Women (Cummings) (as Tom Standish)

1931

Body and Soul (Santell) (as Jim Watson); Bad Sister (Henley) (as Valentine Corliss); A Holy Terror (Cummings) (as Steve Nash); Women of All Nations (Walsh) (as Stone)

1932

Love Affair (Freeland) (as Jim Leonard); Big City Blues (LeRoy) (as Adkins); Three on a Match (LeRoy) (as Ace)

1934

Midnight (Erskine) (as Garboni)

1936

The Petrified Forest (Mayo) (as Duke Mantee); Bullets or Ballots (Keighley) (as Bugs Fenner); Two Against the World (McGann) (as Sherry Scott); China Clipper (Enright) (as Hap Stuart); Isle of Fury (McDonald) (as Val Stevens)

1937

Black Legion (Mayo) (as Frank Taylor); The Great O'Malley (Dieterle) (as John Phillips); Marked Woman (Lloyd Bacon) (as David Graham); Kid Galahad (Curtiz) (as Turkey Morgan); San Quentin (Lloyd Bacon) (as Joe "Red" Kennedy); Dead End (Wyler) (as Baby Face Martin); Stand-In (Garnett) (as Quintain)

1938

Swing Your Lady (Enright) (as Ed Hatch); Crime School (Seiler) (as Mark Braden); Men Are Such Fools (Berkeley) (as Harry Galleon); The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (Litvak) (as Rock Valentine); Racket Busters (Lloyd Bacon) (as Martin); Angels with Dirty Faces (Curtiz) (as James Frazier)

1939

King of the Underworld (Seiler) (as Joe Gurney); The Oklahoma Kid (Lloyd Bacon) (as Whip McCord); You Can't Get Away with Murder (Seiler) (as Frank Wilson); Dark Victory (Goulding) (as Michael O'Lery); The Roaring Twenties (Walsh) (as George Hally); The Return of Doctor X (Sherman) (as Dr. Marshall Cane)

1940

Invisible Stripes (Lloyd Bacon) (as Chuck Martin); Virginia City (Curtiz) (as John Murrell); It All Came True (Seiler) (as Grasselli); Brother Orchid (Lloyd Bacon) (as Jack Buck); They Drive By Night (The Road to Frisco ) (Walsh) (as Paul Fabrini)

1941

The Maltese Falcon (Huston) (as Sam Spade); High Sierra (Walsh) (as Roy Earle); The Wagons Roll at Night (Enright) (as Nick Coster)

1942

All Through the Night (Sherman) (as Gloves Donahue); In This Our Life (Huston); The Big Shot (Seiler) (as Duke Berne); Across the Pacific (Huston) (as Rick Leland); Casablanca (Curtiz) (as Rick Blaine)

1943

Action in the North Atlantic (Lloyd Bacon) (as Joe Rossi); Thank Your Lucky Stars (David Butler); Sahara (Zoltan Korda) (as Sgt. Joe Gunn)

1944

Passage to Marseilles (Curtiz) (as Martac); To Have and Have Not (Hawks) (as Harry Morgan)

1945

Conflict (Bernhardt) (as Richard Mason)

1946

Two Guys from Milwaukee (David Butler); The Big Sleep (Hawks) (as Philip Marlowe)

1947

Dead Reckoning (Cromwell) (as Rip Murdock); The Two Mrs. Carrolls (Godfrey) (as Geoffrey Carroll); Dark Passage (Daves) (as Vincent Parry); Always Together (de Cordova)

1948

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston) (as Fred C. Dobbs); Key Largo (Huston) (as Frank McCloud)

1949

Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray) (as Andrew Martin);Tokyo Joe (Heisler) (as Joe Barrett)

1950

Chain Lightning (Heisler) (as Matt Brennan); In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray) (as Dixon Steele)

1951

The Enforcer (Windust, uncredited Raoul Walsh) (as Martin Ferguson); Sirocco (Bernhardt) (as Harry Smith)

1952

The African Queen (Huston) (as Charlie Allnut); Deadline— U.S.A. (Richard Brooks) (as Ed Hutcheson); The Road to Bali (Walker) (as himself)

1953

Battle Circus (Richard Brooks) (as Major Jeb Webbe); Beat the Devil (Huston) (as Billy Danreuther)

1954

The Love Lottery (Charles Crichton); The Caine Mutiny (Dmytryk) (as Captain Queeg); A Star Is Born (Cukor) (voice only); Sabrina (Wilder) (as Linus Larabee); The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz) (as Harry Dawes)

1955

We're No Angels (Curtiz) (as Joseph); The Left Hand of God (Dymytryk) (as Jim Carmady); The Desperate Hours (Wyler) (as Glen Griffin)

1956

The Harder They Fall (Robson) (as Eddie Willis)

Publications

On BOGART: books—

Gehman, Richard, Bogart, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1965.

Goodman, Ezra, Bogey: The Good-Bad Guy, New York, 1965.

McCarty, Clifford, Bogey: The Films of Humphrey Bogart, New York, 1965.

Michael, Paul, Humphrey Bogart: The Man and His Films, Indianapolis, 1965.

Ruddy, Jonah, and Jonathan Hill, The Bogey Man: Portrait of a Legend, London, 1965.

Hyams, John, Bogie, New York, 1966.

Huston, John, An Open Book, New York, 1972.

Barbour, Alan, Humphrey Bogart, New York, 1973.

Benchley, Nathaniel, Humphrey Bogart, Boston, 1975.

Eyles, Allen, Bogart, New York, 1975.

Hyams, Joe, Bogart and Bacall, New York, 1975.

Bacall, Lauren, Lauren Bacall by Myself, New York, 1978.

Screen Greats, Volume III: Bogart, New York, 1980.

Cutterland, Frank, Humphrey Bogart, Paris, 1981.

Pettigrew, Terence, Bogart: A Definitive Study of His Film Career, London, 1981.

Brooks, Louise, Lulu in Hollywood, New York, 1982.

Winkler, Willi, Humphrey Bogart und Hollywoods Schwarze Serie, Munich, 1985.

Fuchs, Wolfgang J., Humphrey Bogart: Cult-Star: A Documentation, Berlin, 1987.

Coe, Jonathan, Humphrey Bogart: Take It & Like It, New York, 1991.

Sklar, Robert, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield, Princeton, New Jersey, 1992.

Stuart, Gloria, Boating with Bogart, Los Angeles, 1993.

Bogart, Stephen Humphrey, with Gary Provost, Bogart: In Search of My Father, New York, 1995.

Bogart, Stephen Humphery, Bogart, New York, 1995.

Baxt, George, The Humphrey Bogart Murder Case, West Seneca, 1996.

Lax, Eric, Bogart, New York, 1997.

Meyers, Jeffrey, Bogart: A Life in Hollywood, New York, 1997.

Sperber, A.M., Bogart, New York, 1997.

Schlesinger, Judith, Bogie: A Life in Pictures, New York, 1998.

Duchovnay, Gerald, Humphrey Bogart: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1999.

On BOGART: articles—

Current Biography 1942, New York, 1942.

Obituary in New York Times, 15 January 1957.

McCarty, Clifford, "Humphrey Bogart 1899–1957," in Films in Review (New York), May 1957.

Cooke, Alistair, "Epitaph for a Tough Guy," in Atlantic (Greenwich, Connecticut), May 1957.

Towne, Robert, "Bogart and Belmondo," in Cinema (Beverly Hills), December 1965.

Brooks, Louise, "Humphrey and Bogey," in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1966–67.

Davis, Paxton, "Bogart, Hawks, and The Big Sleep Revisited—Frequently," in Film Journal (New York), Summer 1971.

"Humphrey Bogart," in Lumière du cinéma (Paris), March 1977.

Mellen, Joan, "Humphrey Bogart: Moral Tough Guy," in Close-Ups: The Movie Star Book, edited by Danny Peary, New York, 1978.

Sarris, Andrew, "Humphrey Bogart," in The Movie Star, edited by Elisabeth Weis, New York, 1981.

Schickel, Richard, "Bogart," in Film Comment (New York), May/June 1986.

Talty, Stephen, "Young Bogart," in American Film (Washington, D.C.), April 1991.

Fagen, Herb, "Remembering Bogie," in Filmfax (Evanston), August-September 1992.

Radio Times (London), 26 October 1996.

* * *

Humphrey Bogart had a privileged upbringing in Manhattan, the son of a noted surgeon; later, he had to leave college for disciplinary reasons. He served during World War I in the Navy, and suffered an injury during shelling which slightly paralyzed his upper lip, giving him the tight-lipped appearance and the suggestion of hesitancy in his speech that became the hallmark of his screen persona. After the war, he worked in the theater, first as a junior in stage management and later as a performer in youthful, romantic parts. A celebrated review by Alexander Woolcott in 1922 described him in a play called Swiftly as "inadequate." Nevertheless, during the 1920s he remained in employment, and he had the pertinacity to go to Hollywood when sound required the participation of new, stage-trained performers from Broadway. He constantly returned to the stage when he was dissatisfied with the supporting roles he was given in such films as A Devil with Women, Body and Soul, and Love Affair. The first role characteristic of his future image was in the theater production of Robert E. Sherwood's semipoetic play The Petrified Forest (1935), which the following year was made into a film by Warner Brothers. Warners intended to give Bogart's part—the gangster, Duke Mantee—to Edward G. Robinson. That Bogart got the part had to do with the intervention of Leslie Howard, who played the lead in both the play and the film; Howard insisted that Bogart reappear as Duke Mantee. 1936, therefore, marked the first appearance in film of the gaunt, sinister, slow-speaking Bogart persona. Fortunately, the film was successful and drew favorable critical attention.

Bogart was not, however, to become a charismatic star immediately, though he appeared, normally in a gangster role, in an endless flow of films during the next five years, from San Quentin, Crime School, and Racket Busters to Angels with Dirty Faces, King of the Underworld, and The Roaring Twenties. The Bogart image was very marked in William Wyler's Dead End in which he played a ruthless, cynical gangster rejected alike by his mother and his former girlfriend on his return to the New York slums in which he had been raised. This was followed in 1941 by Raoul Walsh's High Sierra with an exceptional script by John Huston and performance by Bogart as the aging, disillusioned gangster who has a change of heart. The devotion to "Bogey" was born of such later films as Huston's The Maltese Falcon, with Bogart as the ruthless but basically human Sam Spade; Michael Curtiz's Oscar-winning Casablanca, again with Bogart as the rough-surfaced but vulnerable dark horse; and Howard Hawks's two films To Have and Have Not— Lauren Bacall's film debut—and The Big Sleep, also with Bacall and with Bogart playing a private eye with a heart. Bogart's celebrated romance with Bacall led to her becoming his fourth wife.

Bogart's widening range of characters (which added to his stature as an actor, while increasing the impact of his always recognizable personal style and image) expanded notably under Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, and The African Queen (the latter gaining him an Oscar); in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place ; in Richard Brooks's serious story with a newspaper setting, Deadline ; and Edward Dmytryk's The Caine Mutiny, in which he gave one of his finest performances as the paranoid Captain Queeg. He returned to his former gangster role in William Wyler's The Desperate Hours, and in his last appearance before his premature death in 1957, in Mark Robson's The Harder They Fall, he played a worn-out sportswriter in the more cynical mood of earlier films.

As Joan Mellen calls Bogart the epitome of a "moral tough guy," his stardom, considerably shorter than actors such as Cary Grant and Gary Cooper, also presents an irony that none of the other stars of his generation "remains such a lively presence in our imaginations." Indeed, as Richard Schickel continues to remind us "it is worth lingering at that crossroads and contemplating the evidence about who he was and what he was that was left there in plain sight." Throughout his career till his death and onward for almost four decades now, the Bogart image and the sense of integrity and courage that image carries prevail at the center of American film history.

—Roger Manvell, updated by Guo-Juin Hong