Humphrey Bogart
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Current revision as of 21:26, 19 December 2007
Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) was the man. One of the greatest men who ever lived. The essence of cool. And then some.
[edit] Life
According to myth, Bogart was born on Christmas Day in 1899. He was the original Gerber baby. He rose to fame playing tough guys like Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest and "Mad Dog" Roy Earle in High Sierra, before really leaping to stardom by replacing George Raft in the role of Sam Spade, hard-boiled private eye in The Maltese Falcon, the first real film noir.
Then WWII started, and Bogey took a few war movie roles. He played one of his greatest roles as Rick Blaine, owner of Rick's Cafe Americaine in Michael Curtiz's explosively great Casablanca. He was Harry Morgan in Howard Hawks's film version of Hemingway's worst novel, To Have and Have Not. Then he was a new kind of private eye as Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's creation in Hawks's masterwork The Big Sleep. In both these films, he starred with his delectable wife, Lauren Bacall, giving rise to the term Bogey & Bacall. She may have been much younger than him, but they fit perfectly, and would go on to co-star in two more movies, Dark Passage and Key Largo, the latter also starring Lionel Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson, and Claire Trevor, who won an Oscar.
In 1948, Bogart re-teamed with Falcon director John Huston for maybe his greatest role as Fred C. Dobbs, the poor prospector who descends into greed and paranoia when he and his partners (Tim Holt and Huston's father Walter) strike it rich. He was similarly paranoid as Captain Queeg in Edward Dmytryk's The Caine Mutiny, and he was a psycho screenwriter in Nicholas Ray's pre-Rebel noir In a Lonely Place. He had a few more great roles before dying of stomach cancer in 1957.
[edit] Cultural influence
Bogey crystallized classic film, from his early Warner Bros. gangster roles to his part in creating noir, and then transcending it. His inimitable style of holding a cigarette has led to the term bogey, as in, "Don't bogey that joint," and the image of his face instantly brings to mind a whole related series of symbols and ideas (cynicism, self-interest, rebellion)- it was used to this effect in Jean-Luc Godard's 1959 post-noir Breathless. Bogey was, is, and will always be the man.
[edit] Partial filmography
- The Petrified Forest (1936)
- Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
- High Sierra (1940)
- The Maltese Falcon (1941)
- Across the Pacific
- Action in the North Atlantic
- All Through the Night
- Casablanca
- To Have and Have Not (1944)
- The Big Sleep (1946)
- Dark Passage (1947)
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
- Key Largo (1948)
- In a Lonely Place (1950)
- Knock on Any Door
- The Harder They Fall
- The Caine Mutiny
- Sabrina (1954)
- The Left Hand of God (1955)
- Beat the Devil (1956)
