Was Humphrey Bogart a Great Actor, or a Movie Star?
Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Image courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures.
Sometimes in life there are mysteries that run deep, into the very soil of Creation. These things defy explanation, and our minds cannot really comprehend the true nature of the thing. The vastness of space, for instance, or the absurdity of life. One that has always puzzled me is how Humphrey Bogart, a Napoleon-sized chain-smoker with a bulldog’s face ended up married to Lauren Bacall, one of Hollywood’s all-time great beauties. Even more amazing is that their marriage was apparently not a studio concoction, but an actual union of love - she remained by his side as he drank and smoked himself to death in 1957. He was not yet 60 years old.
What exactly was it about Humphrey Bogart that compelled Lauren Bacall to fall in love with him? The same thing, undoubtedly, that made American movie-goers fall in love with him. Something ineffable, that cannot be captured or measured. Movie star charisma. If you have it, you have it. And if you don’t, you don’t. It’s not a skill that can be learned. It’s an inner presence, inexplicable as time, that can be projected through the screen and onto the audience, casting a spell over them. Tom Cruise has it. He can carry a film simply by virtue of being in it. And Humphrey Bogart had it. Bogart starred in many of the best and most influential films from Hollywood’s Golden Age. He ruled the cinema in the 1940s. He made classic, wonderful movies opposite Lauren Bacall and then ran out the rest of his life married to her.
And yet, from the outside looking in, there was nothing about this man that screamed movie star. He had missing teeth. He reportedly often had to film scenes wearing lifts so that he wouldn’t appear shorter than his female co-stars. He chain smoked and drank voraciously. His face, described as “swarthy”, and his body as “wiry”, are not exactly the stuff of leading men. And yet almost every film he touched in the 1940s is still considered a classic.
The Hollywood studio system was then still in full bloom. The production, distribution and exhibition of films was controlled by a couple of major studios - MGM, Fox, Paramount, RKO and a few others. That means their films were guaranteed to play, because the studios owned the theaters and could ensure a market always existed for their product. Some people look back on this as Hollywood’s Golden Age (it was eventually ruled to be an anti-competitive monopolistic business practice, and production studios were forced to divest from their theater chains). What it meant in practice was that a very narrow group of executives and producers controlled the entire film production pipeline in Hollywood. Studios signed creative talent to long-term contracts, and then a couple of king-makers like Irving Thalberg or David O. Selznick basically decided what got made. At Warner Bros in the 1930s and 40s, Hal B. Wallis played this role.
Bogart was signed to Warner Bros when he had his breakout role - 1941’s High Sierra. Written by John Huston, who would go on to be very important to Bogart’s career as well as a seminal figure in shaping the noir genre, it’s a crime caper film. Bogart had by then been typecast as a tough guy for some reason, even though a gust of wind would have knocked him over. I think it was really all about the way he talked and held himself that somehow gave the impression when he was on screen that he was a this larger than life force of nature, immovable as the sea. He was what people of the time imagined a tough guy to be, and so that’s what he became. That is the alchemy of cinema, I suppose. Personally I find High Sierra underwhelming, but it was the beginning of a monster couple of years for Bogart.
Later in 1941, he starred as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Written and directed by John Huston, and based on the classic hard-boiled detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon is rightfully considered one of the greatest films of all time. It is also generally considered one of, if not the first, movie in the film noir genre. All the classic elements are there - the hard-bitten crime narrative, the femme fatale, the careful use of light and shadows to suggest a world lost in a moral vacuum and awash with cynicism. It’s not just an entertaining film - it is a cultural and cinematic milestone that would exert immense influence on the subsequent creative direction of Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s and well beyond. And at the heart of this film was Humphrey Bogart, anchoring the entire thing with his nasal monotone straight-talking hard-boiled sleuth persona.
1941 was a big year for Bogie. And he followed it up in 1942 with Casablanca, opposite Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains. Many fans of Old Hollywood (though not me) will argue that Casablanca is the greatest screenplay ever written, with many immortal lines like “Here’s looking at you kid” and “Round up the usual suspects” and of course “It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world” which would no doubt sound like gibberish to a modern audience. I think The Maltese Falcon is the better and more influential film, but Casablanca is perfectly representative of the gold standard for screenwriting in 1942 Hollywood. It’s what Hollywood considered its perfect self, and what America expected from the Hollywood dream factory - a wartime tale of romance, intrigue and snappy one-liners delivered by a leading man who somehow managed to control the screen with the simple act of his existence. Casablanca won more awards and made more money than The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart was a movie star.
He then entered a collaborative phase of four films starring opposite Lauren Bacall, during which they fell in love and got married (after Bogart divorced his then-wife, Mayo Methot). Probably the most famous of these is the first one, To Have and Have Not based on the Ernest Hemingway novel. Released in 1944 and directed by Howard Hawks, the chemistry between Bacall and Bogart was unmistakable. It’s exemplified in the famous whistle scene, where she delivers the following scene-stealer of a line: “You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve? You just put your lips together, and blow.” Simply reading that on the page it seems like a nothingburger, but that was the genius of Bacall and Bogart and the way their scenes together played. There was so much subtext and meaning embedded in the way they delivered the lines, and the way their exchanges became a verbal game of a cat-and-mouse, that you could only really understand why that line-reading is so great if you watch the film. And that is what made their films together so compelling.
Bogart finished out the 1940s with a couple more Bacall pictures, like The Big Sleep, another noir film directed by Howard Hawks. And the hits kept coming. John Huston returned to direct him in 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This film is very famous, and mainly remembered for the line “We don't need no stinking badges!" which is actually a misquote and not the real line. I think this film is terribly overrated, but America loved it. John Huston’s father, Walter Huston, ended up winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor playing a character who, if we look back on it now, appears to be unknowingly in an SNL skit doing a parody of an old mining prospector.
In 1951 Bogart starred in his final hit, The African Queen, directed once again by John Huston. Acting opposite Katharine Hepburn, Bogart would win his first and only Oscar for this film, which I confess I have never seen. Following The African Queen, Humphrey Bogart ended his string of hits and passed away a few years later. By the early 1950s Bogart’s health was becoming an issue but also the nature of Hollywood was starting to change. Big biblical and historical epics were starting to become popular, as were lavish MGM musicals. The studios were slowly losing their hammerlock on every aspect of the film industry, which meant they could not longer shape tastes to quite the degree they enjoyed in the 1940s.
But most importantly, acting itself was changing, and it changed in a big way when Marlon Brando exploded on the scene as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando brought to that performance a raw, animal magnetism and charisma that was revolutionary. There is, I think, a very clear line between a movie star and a great actor. A movie star has screen presence and charisma. They can carry a film. Prior to 1951, all the famous leading men were movie stars. Humphrey Bogart was a movie star. Carey Grant was a movie star. Spencer Tracey was a movie star. But they weren’t great actors. Bogart always played the same character in every film. Either he was the tough fast-talking sleuth, or the tough-fast talking war veteran, or the tough fast-talking gangster. He always snapped his sentences off like bullets, and his expression hardly ever changed. That is what audiences expected a leading man to be, at the time.
Marlon Brando was an actor. He was Method. His range was tremendous, his power unmistakable. When he was at his best on screen - in Streetcar, in On the Waterfront, in The Godfather - no one could touch him. You simply couldn’t look away when he was on the screen. So just as Bogart was beginning to fade from the scene, the acting world was changing and maybe it would have left him behind anyway. Marlon Brando and James Dean would set the bar for acting in the 1950s.
Bogart was what the studios thought a tough-talking, stoic leading man should look like in the 1940s and so they made him that person on the screen. This resulted in some of the greatest films of all time, the heyday of the classical Hollywood leading man. But part of the charm of Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1940s is the artifice of those films, the way they are so carefully constructed on big lots and sound stages owned by the studios who controlled every aspect of the process from beginning to end. Bogart perfectly fit the role of someone manufactured to play a part. He played that particular part well, maybe better than anyone else ever has.
That control started to loosen in the 1950s. Naturalistic performances were coming into vogue and public tastes as well as the structure of the industry were shifting. I don’t think Humphrey Bogart ever could have been a particularly great actor. But for that span of a decade or so in the 1940s, there was certainly no greater movie star in the world.
