Humphrey Bogart: The Face That Wasn't Supposed to Work
Fox Studios dropped his contract after sixteen months on the reasoning that the snarl and the lisp would never appeal to female audiences. Sixty-odd years later, in 1999, the American Film Institute named Humphrey Bogart the greatest male screen legend of all time. Almost nothing about the career was supposed to happen: he was thirty-six before he became a star, and he spent the years before that playing juveniles in drawing-room comedies.
A Doctor's Son
He was born in New York City on 25 December 1899, the only son of Belmont DeForest Bogart, a physician, and Maude Humphrey, a successful magazine illustrator. Two younger sisters, Frances and Kay, completed a household that was prosperous, professional and — by every account of Bogart's later manner — not especially warm.
The education was expensive and unsuccessful. He went to the Delancey School through the fifth grade, then to Trinity School in New York, where scarlet fever cost him a year. In 1917 he was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, disliked it thoroughly, failed several courses and came home.
The Navy and the Lip
In 1918 he joined the U.S. Navy and served on convoy duty aboard the *Leviathan*. The most durable account of what happened next is that a German U-boat shelled the ship and Bogart was struck in the mouth by a piece of flying wood that pierced his upper lip. The nerve damage produced the faint lisp and the pulled-back snarl that became, in time, the most imitated speech pattern in American cinema. A competing version blames his father. Either way, the injury that a studio would later call unmarketable turned out to be his signature.
Tennis, Anyone?
From 1920 to 1926 he worked steadily on Broadway, gaining favourable notice in the 1923–24 hit *Meet the Wife* and otherwise being cast as the well-bred young man who enters through the French windows — roles he dismissed for the rest of his life as "Tennis, anyone?" parts. He married the actress Helen Menken in 1926 and separated from her about eighteen months later; married the actress Mary Philips in 1928, a union that broke in 1937 when his move to California collided with her Broadway career.
Duke Mantee
Everything changed with a stage role in Robert E. Sherwood's *The Petrified Forest*, in which Bogart played the escaped killer Duke Mantee — watchful, exhausted and genuinely frightening. When Warner Bros. bought the film rights, its star Leslie Howard insisted that Bogart come with the play. The 1936 film made him, at thirty-six, a major star.
Warners then did what Warners did, and put him to work. Between 1936 and 1941 Bogart made twenty-nine gangster pictures: he played a convict in nine of them and faced execution in eight. *Bullets or Ballots* (1936), *San Quentin* (1937), *Dead End* (1937), *The Roaring Twenties* (1939), *They Drive by Night* (1940) — a punishing schedule of second billing and violent deaths that functioned, in retrospect, as the most thorough apprenticeship any American screen actor ever received.
Rick Blaine
*High Sierra* (1941) broke him out, and *The Maltese Falcon* the same year installed the persona for good: the professional who has decided, against his own interests, to keep to a code. Then came *Casablanca* (1942) and Rick Blaine, the world-weary nightclub owner whose cynicism turns out to be a form of disappointed idealism. The film took Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay; Bogart took his first Academy Award nomination and lost to Paul Lukas.
In 1944 he made *To Have and Have Not*, from Hemingway, and met his co-star Lauren Bacall. They married in 1945 — his fourth marriage, following the volatile 1938–1945 union with the actress Mayo Methot, a partnership so publicly combustible the press called them the Battling Bogarts — and had two children, Stephen and Leslie. Bogart and Bacall made *The Big Sleep* (1946) and *Key Largo* (1948) together, and the screen chemistry has never gone stale.
The Late Range
The last decade was his most interesting. *The Treasure of the Sierra Madre* (1948) showed him willing to play a man disintegrating into paranoid greed, with no charm held in reserve. *The African Queen* (1951), in which he played a Cockney riverboat captain, finally won him the Academy Award for Best Actor — the only one of his career. *The Caine Mutiny* (1954) gave him a psychologically collapsing ship's captain; *Sabrina* (1954) an entirely straight businessman. *The Barefoot Contessa* (1954), *We're No Angels* (1955) and *The Desperate Hours* (1955) followed.
He also used his standing politically. In 1947 he and Bacall travelled to Washington with John Huston, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly and others to protest the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings into Hollywood. In 1952 he backed Adlai Stevenson for president.
Why Humphrey Is Called a Genius
The word, applied to Bogart, means something narrow and worth naming precisely: he was not a writer, director or intellectual, and the case for him rests entirely on performance. What he invented was a way of underplaying that no one had quite managed before in sound cinema. The style is subtractive. Where his contemporaries signalled emotion, Bogart withheld it and let the audience supply the interior life — the flicker at the corner of the mouth, the beat of silence before the line, the sense of a man who has already had this conversation with himself and lost. The scarred lip and the lisp, which a studio classed as defects, became instruments: they slowed his delivery and gave every sentence the quality of something carefully decided rather than felt.
The counter-case is real. He was for most of his career a studio contract player who took what he was given, and the range within a single film is often small; he plays variations on one man across twenty years. He was not a chameleon in the manner of Laurence Olivier or Alec Guinness, and it is fair to say that Bogart mostly played Bogart. The AFI's 1999 verdict — greatest male screen legend of all time — is a judgment about iconic power, about how completely a persona lodged itself in the culture, and not a claim about technical versatility. But the persona was constructed, deliberately and over decades of gangster pictures, by an actor who understood exactly what the camera would do with restraint. That is a craft achievement of the first order, and calling it anything grander does him no favours.
Legacy
Bogart, a heavy smoker throughout his life, died of throat cancer on 14 January 1957 in Hollywood. He was fifty-seven, and had spent barely twenty years as a star. The influence ran straight through the American screen's handling of criminals and reluctant heroes for the next half-century, and the fatalistic half-smile became shorthand for a whole idea of adult masculinity: compromised, private, ultimately decent. The AFI's 1999 ranking, arriving forty-two years after his death, merely confirmed what film culture had long since settled. The man Fox rejected as unmarketable became the definition of a movie star.
Achievements
- Academy Award for Best Actor — 1952
- Worked as character actor, screenwriter and stage actor
