Constantine Santas - The Essential Humphrey Bogart

The Essential Humphrey Bogart

The Essential Humphrey Bogart

Constantine Santas

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Copyright 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Santas, Constantine.

The essential Humphrey Bogart / Constantine Santas.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-6093-1 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-6094-8 (ebook) 1. Bogart, Humphrey, 1899-1957Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PN2287.B48S34 2016

791.4302'8092dc23

2015034030

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To my brother, Gerasimos

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Gerasimos Santas of the University of California, Irvine, for reading large sections of the book and offering useful suggestions on the readability of the text. Also thanks to Professor James M. Wilson for allowing me to teach films of Bogart in his classes and to test ideas from the book in classroom discussions. Also thanks to Joseph M. Dmohowski, librarian at Whittier College, for providing me a list of potential reviewers, and Harikleia Sirmans, from Valdosta Public Library, for compiling the index.

Introduction

The countless books, articles, reviews, and online comments that have been written about Humphrey Bogarts life and work testify to his longevity and legacy in the cinema of the last sixty-plus years since his death in 1957. But most of these works center on the great classics The Maltese Falcon , Casablanca , The Treasure of Sierra Madre , The African Queen , and a handful of others. The purpose of this book is to broaden the scope of the study of Bogarts work by offering a close analysis of a good number of others, including several from his early period in the 1930s and others from the 1940s and 1950s, films by and large left behind either because of sheer neglect or lack of availability. Such films as Dead End , The Enforcer , and Battle Circus , to mention a few, were not available on DVD until 2012, and even Blu-ray versions of classic films were late in coming. The Warner Bros. Archives Collection has brought to the surface forgotten movies of merit ( The Left Hand of God is a notable example), allowing todays viewer to broaden his or her knowledge of the Bogart oeuvre. Streaming in outlets such as Netflix, Google, and Amazon also offers the viewer a chance to study Bogarts work with the aid of commentaries by film historians, critics, moviemakers, and online reviewers. Of the grand opus of Bogarts eighty-one movies (including shorts), thirty-eight are included here. Only ten of those come from the 1930s period, but a substantial number of his 1940s and 1950s movies are included, with none of the classics left out.

This is not a biography of Bogart. That task has been compellingly achieved by several biographers, including his wife, Lauren Bacall, in Lauren Bacall by Myself ; his son, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, in Bogart: In Search of My Father ; Nathaniel Benchley, in Humphrey Bogart ; and A. E. Sperber and Eric Lax, in the monumental Bogart to mention some of the most important sources used for this book. The aim of The Essential Humphrey Bogart is to evaluate the work of Humphrey Bogart as an actor by a close examination of his most significant movies during the most productive years of his career. The films selected for this task include all his major works, mostly those of the decade between 1941 and 1951, along with many others less famous but nevertheless essential in showing Bogarts evolution as an actor. Bogarts screen persona evolved through the decades, from the juvenile roles he played in the early 1930s; to the gangsters, killers, and hoods he was forced to play when under contract to Warner Bros. until the end of that decade; to the sharp turn his movie career took in the early 1940s, when he became the superstar with classic works such as The Maltese Falcon , Casablanca , and many others to follow. The path that Bogart followed shows his versatility as an actor, his ability to adjust and refine his screen image as it progressed from that of a hood to lover, patriot, sharp-eyed detective, writer, lawyer, prospector, and even priest. No matter what the mask, Bogart showed he could handle any role, revealing his total mastery of the art of acting. He took his art with utter seriousness, was proud to be an actor, and followed his motto to keep working, which eventually brought him recognition and continued esteem among his fans and peers. The selected films here are meant to show how Bogarts art progressed and matured with nearly every film he attempted to the very end.

Bogarts work continues to attract audiences today, something that can be ascribed, at least partly, to the digital age, which has enabled contemporary viewers to rediscover both Bogarts classics and his second-tier but still viewable works. Since 1997, when the original version of The Big Sleep (1945) was released, scores of as-yet-unknown-to-the-public Bogart worksamong theme In a Lonely Place (1950), The Enforcer (1951), Battle Circus (1953), The Left Hand of God (1955), and The Harder They Fall (1956)have been issued on DVD and subsequently on Blu-ray. The increasing availability of Bogart films on DVD and Blu-ray, streaming on various outlets such as Netflix and Amazon, and through the release of older classics from Warner Bros. Archive Collections has brought about what one might call a Bogart renaissance.

In this discussion of Bogarts classics and other significant movies, every entry examines important film highlights and draws relevant biographical materials from the aforementioned biographical sources and other materials, such as critical appraisals and DVD/Blu-ray commentaries. Though Bogarts life is connected to his movie career and is an essential part of it, it is the movies themselves that above all still attract audiences and continue his legacy as one of the legendary actors of Hollywood. Aside from a biographical sketch and a description of the characteristics of his movie persona, our discussions will center on the movies that demonstrate these characteristics. The book has a full Bogart filmography, related documentations citing sources, and a selected bibliography.

A Biographical Note

Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born on Christmas Day in 1899 and died on January 14, 1957, a relatively short span of an extremely eventful life, during which he rose to be one of the greatest stars in American cinema. His father, Belmont DeForest Bogart, was an affluent physician, and his mother, Maud Bogart, was a renowned painter and an illustrator of childrens books. The family lived in New York City, where Dr. Bogart practiced, but moved to their summer residence in Canandaigua Lake, in west New York State, where young Humphrey and his two younger sisters, Frances and Catherine, mixed and played with other children of the elite neighborhood of Seneca Point. Bogart attended Trinity School in New York City and later transferred to the Andover Academy in Massachusetts, one of the oldest and most distinguished prep schools in the country. He was dismissed for lack of discipline, and at the age of eighteen, he joined the US Navy, when the First World War was nearly over. When he was released, at the age of nineteen, he returned to New York, aimless and without work. His familys fortune had nearly vanished due to his fathers poor investments and declining health, and young Bogart found himself in diminished social status. He still had no clue as to what his future would be.