Tired of his "white Pants Willie" roles and depressed after the deaths of his father Belmont and sister Kay, he had to pay off the family debts and prepare vigorously his next Hollywood assault.
His breakout happened in The Petrified Forest (1936), thanks to Leslie Howard's insistence. His performance was described as "superb", and his effort playing the criminal Duke Mantee as sheer "class" by The Hollywood Reporter. In 1937 (the year he divorces Mary Philips) he plays gangster Baby Face Martin in Dead End directed by William Wyler. His alley scene with Claire Trevor (nominated to Best Supporting actress) oozes despair, framed by Toland's gritty cinematography.
In 1938 Bogart married Mayo Methot (The Portland Rosebud actress in the The Mad Honeymoon play by William Brady) with whom he worked in Marked Woman. The relationship with Mayo would mark the lowest point in Bogart's emotional stability, since "Sluggy" (he also called her Madam) behaved in paranoid and aggressive mood, even stabbing Bogart once.
Bogart played another outlaw in High Sierra directed by Raoul Walsh in 1941. According to Walsh, on the set of They Drive by Night: "the salary was his only thrill." His role as Roy Earle in High Sierra was called "the twilight of the American gangster" by The New York Times. "I wouldn't give you two cents for a dame without a temper," Bogart says to Ida Lupino. Irving Rapper (High Sierra's dialogue director) remembers Bogie infatuated with Ida.
However, he could be shy shooting kiss scenes: in The Maltese Falcon by Huston (1941), Bogart needed to repeat 7 takes. Mary Astor, who played the femme fatale betrayed by Sam Spade, explained that Bogart had a saliva trouble.
His final lowlife gangster role was in The Big Shot in 1942. The same year he played Rick Blaine in the most romantic film ever: Casablanca directed by Michael Curtiz, Ingrid Bergman playing Ilsa Lund (inspired by the angelic Ilse from "Harz Journey" poem by Heine) which would catapult Bogie as a true movie star (even a sex-symbol) leaving behind his contract player status in Warner. Huston said Bogie wasn't a womanizer.
The next movie for Bogart that transformed him into a definitive legend was The Big Sleep (1946) by Howard Hawks, after To Have and Have Not (1944) the film based on a Hemingway's novel that featured Lauren Bacall's entrance into Bogart's romantic awakening.-08.jpg)
Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep novel, although he wouldn't help Hawks much about his famously complicated story plot, he praised Bogart's interpretation of Phillip Marlowe: "Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also, he has a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt".
Article comments
1 - Alan Kurtz
On page 3, you write: "My favorite performance of Bogart is In Another Place (1950) directed by Nicholas Ray."
Yet in the preceding paragraph you refer to "Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950)."
May we assume one of these titles is correct? If so, it might be nice to use it consistently, especially since that's your favorite performance of Bogart.
2 - kendra
The correct title is "In a Lonely Place", sorry that was a typo!
3 - Alan Kurtz
I keep reminding my fellow Blogcritics writers, we can't rely on our editors to help wring mistakes out of our prose. BC's editors are for the most part nonprofessionals with neither the time, the skill, nor the inclination to read our stuff carefully. A recent example comes from BC's politics section, where in his very first sentence the author misidentifies George H.W. Bush "as 43rd President of the United States." (He was #41; his son was #43.) And this slipped by in, mind you, the politics section, where any editor worth his salt would've spotted and corrected that immediately.
As a writer, I strive to live up to the second adjective in the motto that BC founder Eric Olsen emblazoned on the masthead of each and every page on this site: "A sinister cabal of superior writers." The sinister part is a joke, of course; but I take superior very seriously.
And for those of us who subscribe to that ethos, we have to do it ourselves, since our editors are useless in that regard.
4 - kendra
I want to thank you, Aln, for having pointed this mistake out, and the Blogcritics editors team for having fixed it.
5 - nate
Good review of a timeless icon
6 - kendra
thanks, Nate! Bogart is a timeless figure, The London Times wrote his screen persona was the male equivalent to the hooker with a heart gold that Marilyn Monroe constructed.