I'm pretty sure we no longer live in an age of cinema icons. If we do, then it's even odds that what we've got now is by no means the same thing. I'm also willing to bet the matinee stars of an older era wouldn't have much of a clue of what to think about our penchant for making trolls like Justin Kjellberg into internet darlings. They at least had the luxury of living in an analog age. Back then, none of them had to deal with the level of exposure that we unleash on the people we choose to entertain us today. I know it's possible to claim that the Golden Age of the Hollywood Star is over for one simple reason. Most of the names I'm thinking of who fit that title are now almost lost to time. It seems like just a handful of artists from that era have been able to maintain anything like a genuine pop culture legacy for themselves. Chief among them are guys like Groucho Marx, John Wayne, or Alfred Hitchcock. There's another one in that bunch who, as of this writing, is still able to hold an admirable spot somewhere just above 50% in terms of audience awareness and acclaim. His name is Humphrey Bogart, and unlike a lot of stage names that sound made up, it turns out this was the actual moniker his parents christened him with at birth. It's kind of a miracle that his legacy has hung around for this long, yet when you look at some of the films he starred in, then even today, it remains just possible to see why a guy like him could become an immortal.
In order to figure out why and how that happened, we still need to back track just a bit. I think the words of an old documentary (made by the same producer who would give us Gene Wilder in a Chocolate Factory, no less) said it all best. "Humphrey Bogart brought an unmistakable power and excitement to the screen". He was the kind of actor who could convey "an innate sense of world-weary toughness", while also suggesting that "underneath lay an innate tenderness". Another way to put it is to say that Bogart greatest calling card as an actor wasn't just that he was good at playing tough customers. He was more like an originator of a by now familiar staple: the Tough Guy as this fundamentally Haunted Soul. As a result, while he is by no means the singular architect of this modern archetype (its origins extend all the way back to the printed page, anyway), there is a sense in which his best work showcases the birth pangs of the kind of protagonist, or anti-hero that Martin Scorsese has gone on to make pretty much the subject of almost every single roll of film he's used. Bogie was good at being the Lonely Everyman Outcast. The lug with a surprising amount of hidden depths, and enough demons contained within always ready to stifle and drag his better angels off into the shadows. To give an idea of what I mean, has anybody seen that one time De Niro directed an actual film? It was called A Bronx Tale. Let's just say that Bogie would have been a good fit for the role of Sonny the mobster.
"On the screen and off, Humphrey Bogart had a style that set him apart from his fellow actors". In truth, though, this seems to have been a talent that he had to work his way towards one grueling role of work at a time. Like pretty much all of the great artists, there was no easy entrance waiting for him somewhere. Bogie came to Tinseltown in it's Golden Age a complete nobody, and pretty much had to beg producers and directors to give him even a bit part in whatever project would take him on. Before that, however, things were almost kind of amusing. There's a sense in which he was the product of the kind of Big Apple that Scorsese knew and "wrote" about his whole life, just not exactly in the way you might think. Based on his screen persona alone, you'd probably figure here's this guy whose grown up dirt poor in some flophouse tenement located somewhere in a piece of detritus that used to be known as the Five Points. It's where he first learned all of life's hard knocks, and how to defend himself against whatever anybody decides to throw at him, to the point where a lot of the bullies cross the street whenever they saw him coming. Maybe he finds refuge in Broadway's theater district, both as a good place to play hooky in and catch some shut-eye, and as a good way for him to keep out of trouble.
The only catch is, the more this young punk from nowhere hangs out in the aisles, the more the acting bug begins to take a hold of him, and soon that's where it all got started, right? Well, no, not really. Not at all in fact. "Born in New York, in 1899, on Christmas Day. Humphrey Deforest Bogart is the son of a prominent surgeon. The screen's future Tough Guy is raised among the cultured and genteel upper middle class. Bogart's mother, Maude, is a famous commercial artist. And her baby, Humphrey, is her favorite model. Her portrait of Bogart at the age of one is widely circulated throughout the nation, and will bring him his first taste of fame. Over the years, as a commercial model, little Humphrey Bogart gazes angelically from the pages of national magazines, in advertisements for a popular baby food". So in other words, as strange as it may seem, when we talk about the childhood of Philip Marlowe, we need to get the idea of
Mean Streets out of our heads (as difficult as that is to do) and think way more along the lines of
The Age of Innocence (Scorsese also claimed that was his most violent picture, for whatever it's worth). It's the kind of thing you're just not prone to expect from someone like Bogie.
From the look of things, the young punk must have felt the same way soon enough. "By the time he's 18, Bogart rebels against his sheltered home life, and joins the Navy during World War I. After the War, at 21, Humphrey Bogart decides to become an actor because, he says, "I was born to be indolent, and this was the softest of rackets". It's the kind of statement which makes me wonder if maybe the punk found out his own ways of getting into trouble even before he joined the Armed Forces, Whatever the case, the rest of pretty straightforward. "During the 1920s, on Broadway, Bogart usually plays the romantic juvenile in drawing room comedies. And reportedly is the first actor to utter the immortal line, "Tennis, anyone"? Bogart fails to achieve stardom on the stage, and in private life he fails in two short-lived marriages. But in the midst of these discouraging years on Broadway, he appears as a "lady killer" in his first film in 1929, and starring Ruth Eddings. It's only an 8 minute Vitaphone short, and like most trivia of it's kind, it soon winds up in studio vaults, forgotten even by film historians. But this one reeler marks the beginning of one of the great careers in motion pictures. Hollywood in the early 30s is in the midst of transition to sound pictures. And many Broadway actors like Humphrey Bogart get a chance in "Talkies". Bogart, however, is given dreary roles in nearly a dozen minor "epics" like Three on a Match. Bogart is a flop in Hollywood, and the studios write him off as just another mediocre actor.
"Returning to New York, Bogart finally lands a talked about part in a hit play,
The Petrified Forest. (It's a) part that Hollywood wants Edward G. Robinson to recreate on the screen. But the play's star, Leslie Howard, refuses to appear in the picture unless his friend Humphrey Bogart can again play the role of Duke Mantee. Knowing that this is his last chance for success in Hollywood, Bogart will perform with a vengeance". It turned out to be the role that helped define his cinematic persona in various ways from then on. In that film, the protagonist declares Bogie's character as "the last of the rugged individualists". It's one of those lines that almost ends up sounding fated in retrospect. "Overnight, Bogart has become a sensation, but not a star. He is assigned as merely a supporting player, the sinister heavy. And the top salaried stars at Warner Bros., James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson will bump him off in picture after picture. Bogart takes this kind of fate philosophically. He says, "The Heavy, full of crime and bitterness, grabs his wounds and talks about death. The audience is his, and his alone". Bogart becomes a master at delivering these farewell addresses". A typical example of such parting wit goes as follows. "Do me a favor, will ya? Don't tell them a dame tripped me up".
"Bogart regards most of his films as mediocre affairs. A proud and sensitive man, he now wants to become a serious actor. But he finds himself acting futilely in roles far beneath his talent...Bogart says the only reason for making money is so you can tell some bigshot to go to hell. And he publicly calls one studio boss "A creep". But in 1941, Bogart finally gets what he wants from his studio. A starring role, in a first class film, The Maltese Falcon. Directed by his friend, John Huston, and aided by Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Mary Astor, Bogart breaths fire into the role of Sam Spade; a cynical, amoral private eye. This is the turning point in Bogart's career. Through the sheer force of his talent he has proven that he is not merely an actor. After all these years, he has become a star (web)". There really wasn't much in the way of looking back after that. Bogie would go on to parlay his natural talents as a thespian in what are now considered to be some of the greatest films ever made. His is a roster that includes Casablanca, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not (that's picture where Bogie met and lost his heart to a his co-star, a girl named Lauren Bacall), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The Caine Mutiny. That's a lot of accolades to rack up for oneself in such a short span of a lifetime. Somehow, Bogart managed to take it all in stride, and was able to create an indelible image in the process.
The film I want to look at today comes from the very tail end of his career. There's a bit of an almost humorous irony to it as well. One of his earliest pictures features a subplot with a surprising enough amount of similarities to the picture I have in mind now. It's a thriller called
The Desperate Hours.
