The archetypal anti-hero
By Vikramdeep Johal

THE Brattle Street Theatre in Massa-chusetts, patronised largely by students of Harvard University, holds a Bogart Film Festival twice a year. Even though he has been dead for over 40 years, Humphrey Bogart still has a huge fan following. Along with Charlie Chaplin, he is widely regarded as the most durable male movie star of all time. For better or worse, no matinee idol in movie history has made the simple act of smoking a cigarette a more fascinating thing to watch. A score of books on his life and his art have appeared over the years, the most recent one by his son who has had to live with the burden of being the progeny of a larger-than-life legend.

He was the wisecracking tough guy in a trenchcoat, who personified the spirit of the American film noir in the forties. One of Hollywood’s imperishable personalities, Bogart — popularly known as Bogie — would have turned a centenarian on Christmas Day this year.

He became a leading film personality, though not yet a star, as a result of his portryal of the gangster Duke Mantee in the 1936 film The Petrified Forest. Bogart’s Duke Mantee was one of the memorable screen characters of the thirties — with his three-day-old beard, black hair combed straight back, moody eyes, unsmiling mouth and sartorial inelegance. Even tough he was less than five-and-a-half feet tall, he managed to display a towering screen presence. The public was also impressed by his peculiar flat dialogue delivery which was to prove so effective in his later films.

Capitalising on the fame which came to him for his performance, Warner Brothers cast him as a gangster in a number of genre films from 1936 through 1940 playing second fiddle to top stars like James Cagney and Edward G.Robinson. In these films, Bogie usually played a one-dimensional character, totally negative and without a spark of humanity, who could be eliminated mercilessly.

Before he settled into the profession that was to bring him much dough and fame, he had had to go through a long period of instability and uncertainty. After being expelled from an academy in Massachusetts due to poor results, Bogie joined the US Navy in 1918 and spent two years as a seaman, crossing the Atlantic back and forth on troop carriers. It was the start of a beautiful friendship between him and the sea, which proved to be a lifelong affair. On one such journey, his ship was shelled by a U-boat and a splinter of wood from a burst pierced his upper lip. The lip was left partly paralysed and the wound also affected his speech. Ironically, the tight-set look and the slight lisp that he got as a result of the accident contributed greatly to his magnetic appeal as a star later on.

After being discharged from the navy, he tried a series of office jobs, including one as a freight checker for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The supervisor once told him that if he worked hard, he might eventually become the president of the Railroad. Bogart recalled:" When I found that there were 50,000 employees between me and the president, I quit." His die-hard fans would agree that it was a very wise decision.

He moved on to be an office boy in World Films through a friend of his whose father had founded the company. During the shooting of a film, the founder quarrelled with the director and placed young Bogart in the director’s chair with orders to finish the film. No wonder he made a mess of it and ultimately had to step aside. Nevertheless, it was the start of his film career.

After a long apprenticeship, he got an important break in 1940 thanks to a fortuitous chain of circumstances. Top star George Raft had been offered the role of a gangster in the picture High Sierra. However, he refused it because he did not want to ‘die’ at the end. The role was also turned down by Cagney and Robinson. The producers had little choice but to offer it to Bogart, who grabbed it with both hands. It was the birth of the anti-hero, the man who unflinchingly followed his own code of ethics no matter how difficult or dangerous the road, with a tough exterior and a soft interior and who managed to win the sympathy of the audience.

A year later, Raft inadvertently furthered Bogart’s career when he refused the leading role in The Maltese Falcon because he wouldn’t entrust his talent to a fledgling director named John Huston. The Maltese Falcon established a whole new genre of detective stories — cool, underplayed, violent and stylish. Bogart’s gravelly voice and intense manner were perfectly suited to the role of a cynical but incorruptible private eye living by his wits in a decadent, amoral society. The association with Huston proved to be most fruitful and became one of the most formidable actor-director combinations, which gave such classics as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen.

Bogart’s performance in Casablanca (1943) is widely regarded as his finest. Playing a uncommitted night-club owner in French Morocco during WWII who has left his days of idealism far behind in Paris (where he had been ditched by a girl he loved), Bogart as Rick Blaine delivered such classic lines as : "I stick my neck out for nobody" and "The problems of the world are not my department." However, under the mask of cynicisim, one can easily detect sensitivity and vulnerability. A man’s actions, as the saying goes, speak louder than his words, for he ultimately helps his beloved and her husband to escape, thus ending up as a moral but tragic hero.

When Warners started making Casablanca, everyone involved, including Bogart and his co-star Ingrid Bergman thought the picture was going to be terrible. Nevertheless, Bogie worked with the same professionalism that he had brought to his other films. The rest is indeed history. The film has commendably passed the test of time, it is considered the greatest achievement of the Hollywood studio system and, last but not the least, Bogart’s understated portrayal is still being used to teach acting at many American film schools.

Bogart was 45 when he met the green-eyed nineteen-year-old lass Lauren Bacall, his leading lady in To Have and Have Not (1945). He was impressed by her screen test. "I think we’ll have some fun working together," he said with considerable foresight. The sizzling reel romance developed into a real one. They married months after the release of the movie and, after three rocky marriages, Bogie finally enjoyed connubial bliss. Bacall shared his happiness all the way and was at his side when he finally lost the battle with lung cancer in January, 1957.

In Huston’s Key Largo (1948), he played a disillusioned war veteran up against a bunch of gangsters. Bogart was completely at home in the role of the reluctant hero. "His loneliness was based on suspicions of everyone’s motives, and the statement of this fact was the everlasting theme of his life’s work", wrote Richard Schickel, the film critic of Time magazine." It accounted for his defensive inwardness, his unbreakable facade."

The Africa Queen (1951) was perhaps his only attempt at featherweight comedy. Huston’s tongue-in-cheek romance-adventure, set on an African river circa WWI, featured Bogart as a boozy, grimy mailboat captain who gets romantically involved with a prim missionary (played by Kate Hepburn) while the two are escaping from the Germans. For his charismatic performance, which saw him exuberantly imitating apes and rhinos, he was awarded the Oscar for best actor.

Bogart was a maverick off-screen as well as on. He was considered a fearless liberal at a time when most of his generation were silently bearing the onslaught of McCarthyism. Acknowledging the plight of Afro-Americans, he spoke out in interviews against segregation and prejudice, knowing fully well that he would be bitterly criticised for airing such opinions. He did not think highly of the Academy Awards and alienated many by his sarcastic remarks, even though he received the Oscar that came his way with a polite thanks.

He was also critical of the bullying ways of the studio bosses. "Don’t let them push you around," he advised young actors. "We are better judges than any studio as to what is good for us. As soon as your name gets known and you feel you can say, ‘I won’t do this,’ if you feel the part is not right go ahead and say it."

An important aspect of his enduring appeal was his unqualified honesty. He hated hypocrisy and resented bunkum even in petty matters, such as wearing a toupee. He said that he wanted to age before the public without faking. He didn’t have smashing looks and yet hardly cared whether he was seen unshaved or unkempt." His very homeliness is what made him attractive to women," suggested film scholar Andrew Sarris. "There is an element of narcissism in most good-looking men. Homely men can escape themselves. They are not smug or complacent."

His honesty about himself worked to his advantage. The media and the public saw a reflection of his public image in his private life. As a result, no amount of scandal could harm him or his career. His four marriages had no more adverse effects on his popularity than his occasional nightclub brawls or his reputation as a two-fisted Scotch drinker because the public expected these things from him.

Bogart-the-man might have been a mortal like all of us, but Bogart-the-legend seems destined for immortality.