![]() humphrey bogart (1899-1957) african queen bogie rarities for sale lauren bacall frank capra richard attenborough isabelle adjani | ![]() [ h u m p h r e y b o g a r t : b o g i e ] "I've been around a long time. Maybe the people like me."
Humphrey Bogart was born in New York on December 25, 1899. His father, Dr Belmont Deforest Bogart, was one of the city's most eminent surgeons. His mother Maud, was a magazine illustrator. After completing his studies at Trinity school, Bogart entered Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Expelled for bad behaviour, he joined the U.S Marines in 1918 and served several months. On his return to civilian life, he was hired by theatrical producer William A.Brady, who made him his road manager and encouraged him to try his hand at acting. His first appearances were somewhat unconvincing but Bogart perevered and gradually learned to master the craft. In 1929 he was spotted by a talent scout in Its a Wise Child and put under a year's contract by 20th Century Fox. At this period he was just a young stage actor with no particular following; the studio uncertain about how best to use him, tried him out in an assortment of genres. The results were uneven and unpromising and Bogart, after being loaned out to Universal for a brief appearance in Bad Sister (1931) - as a man about town who leaves his young wife in the lurch - returned to Broadway, convinced that he was through with cinema for good. The decisive turning point in his hitherto erratic career came in 1935 with Robert E. Sherwood's play The Petrified Forest, in which, for more than seven months he played the gangster Duke Mantee opposite Leslie Howard. When asked to repeat his role on the screen the following year, Howard insisted on Bogart as his co-star. And so it was, at the age of 37, Bogart finally gave up the theatre and began a profitable career as a supporting actor under the aegis of Warners, for which he would make almost all of his film's until 1948. He made an average of one film per two months for the studio, which filed him from the start under 'bad guys'. In four years he had completed an impressive number of gangster roles, supporting such established actors as Edward G.Robinson, James Cagney and George Raft. The parts he played - frequently double crossers condemned to die an ignomious death - were most often used to set the main star off to advantage. These characters' backgrounds remained obscure and their psychology was extremely primitive. Several years had passed since Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931); the gangster was no longer seen as a romantic figure, he was just the flotsam of a sick society. Bogart above-all played the kind of small time loser who could always be outwitted by a strong adversary. A few films, however, allowed him to escape from typecasting: Isle Of Fury in which he was a reformed fugitive; China Clipper (1936) for which he donned the uniform of an ace pilot; and Two Against The World (1936), in which he played the manager of a radio station at odds with his unscrupulous employer. In Marked Woman (1937) he was a tough but kind district attorney who succeeded in breaking up a gang of racketeers with the help of a nightclub hostess (Bette Davis); and in Crime School (1938), he was the liberal head of a prison, who established more humane relations between his staff and the troublesome young inmates. In 1941, Bogart's luck suddenly changed for the better. He was given the lead in Walsh's High Sierra in place of George Raft (who had turned the part down). Although Ida Lupino had top billing and gave one of her finest performance, it was Bogart, in the role of Roy Earle an ageing and dillusioned gangster, who was the discovery of the film. For the first time he revealed a human dimension and depth which went beyond the requirements of the plot. Caught between loyalty to his old boss (who engineers his escape from prison for one last job) and the desire to start afresh with the young woman (Joan Leslie) whom he naively believes is in love with him, Roy is neither a hero nor a villain. He has a history, a past which weighs heavily on his present existence and offers him freedom only at the price of his own death. The forties saw a radical change of direction in Bogart's career. As a result of the general anxiety caused by the war, the cinema gained in maturity, acquiring a new kind of gravity and urgency. Film Noir, an eminently sceptical and ambiguous genre came to the forefront and sought out heroes who would measure up to this increasingly troubled context. It was no longer an age for defying authority and not yet one for collective commitment. Neither gangster nor cop (but a little bit of both), the private eye asserted himself as one of the dominant heroes of the decade. Walsh had endowed Bogart with humanity in High Sierra; Huston gave him morality and the means to defend himself in The Maltese Falcon; Curtiz in Casablanca, added to these a romantic dimension and a reason for living. At the beginning of the film, Rick, the hero, is shown to have taken refuge behind a mask of cynicism, in keeping with the unscrupulous political climate of wartime Casablanca. The unexpected arrival of the woman he has loved painfully reawakens his emotions, forcing him to renounce his pose of disinterested spectator. The film concludes with the need for commitment, one which concerned not only the hero but the whole of America. In 1945 Bogart, whose previous wives had been actresses, Helen Menken, Mary Philips and Mayo Methot, married Lauren Bacall, who was then 21 and would be his greatest partner. Since 1943 and the box-office triumph of Casablanca, Bogart had becoe one of the top ten Hollywood stars. The end of the war saw him return to Film Noir. In 1945 he twice played the role of a murderer: opposite Alexis Smith in Conflict and Barbara Stanwyck in The Two Mrs Carrolls. These off-beat performances had only a limited impact in comparison with The Big Sleep (1946), in which Bogart, once more working with Hawks and Bacall, played another mythical detective: Philip Marlowe. Created by Raymond Chandler in the Thirties, Marlowe was a more romantic character than Spade. More directly implicated in the action, more conscious of the values of which he represented, he was engaged in a quest for 'hidden truth'. Without being a paragon of virtue he had a rigorous conception of honour. No other actor would catch as precisely as Bogart this character's blend of strength and derision, or his equivocal pleasure in venturing down the 'mean streets' and daily facing death. The last seven years of his career saw him gradually abandon heroic roles. With the exception of Beat The Devil (1953), in which Huston attempted a parodic approach to Bogart's screen persona, the majority of his films were well received, proving that the actor had established a lasting and authentic relationship with his fans. As the producer of his own company, Santana Pictures, Bogart made Knock on any door (1949), a socially conscious film which took a stand against capital punishment. Then, after two conventional action films, Tokyo Joe (1949) and Chain Lightning (1950),he played the part of a disenchanted Hollywood screenwriter who is subject to attacks of murderous violence in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950). In The Enforcer (1951) he was a district attorney up against Murder Inc. Shot in the semi-documentary style typical of Warners, it became a Film Noir classic, particularly remarkable for the complexity of its editing and its powerful scenes of violence.(Twenty years later it was discovered that the film's direction, credited to Bretaigne Windust, was the work of Raoul Walsh.) With Deadline USA (1952), a vibrant plea for freedom of the press, Bogart , with the director Richard Brooks, returned to the democratic inspiration of Key Largo and Knock on any Door. The following year, Brooks cast him in Battle Circus as a sceptical and gruff military doctor, overfond of women and alcohol. In The Caine Mutiny (1954), an ambitious Stanley Kramer production directed by Edward Dmytryk, Bogart took on the part of Captain Queeg, a neuurotic, dictatorial officer forcibly removed from command by his subordinates. The film was an ambiguous reflection on power and responsibility in which the actor created an unusual character role. In Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954) he was the sarcastic heir of a rich family in love with his chauffeur's daughter (Audrey Hepburn). Made in the same year, Joseph L.Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa, one of the most fascinating evocations of the world of Hollywood, definitively made Bogart an outsider,a witness. He plays a film director, Harry Dawes, who watches the dazzling rise to stardom of a Spanish dancer (Ava Gardner) and her tragic involvement with an impotent aristocrat. The narrator and spectator of the action in which he cannot intervene, Dawes is the voice of Mankiewicz himself,the director's disillusioned double who embodies the magic of a vanished Hollywood. The actor's creased serene face and understated performance brought both an exceptional resonance and a poignant sense of authenticity to the subject. | ![]() ![]() humprey bogart Signature Collection 6 disc set incl. casablanca, treasure of sierra madre, maltese falcon, high sierra uk dvd set reviewed & in stock the best bogie boxset ... ever! ![]() Bogie & Bacall signature collection 4 Disc Set incl. The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, Key Largo, Dark Passage UK Dvd Set Reviewed & in Stock Bogie & Bacalls' best bits! ![]() ![]() advertise here ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
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