The Bogart Factor

by Thomas McNulty^©
edited by Frank MacShane

"Bogart can be tough without a gun."
— Raymond Chandler, from Selected Letters

By all accounts he was not an avid reader of mysteries and his meetings with Raymond Chandler were filled with cordial, cocktail hour small talk. But Chandler saw something unique in Humphrey Bogart long before the nostalgia cult grew out of the Sixties counter culture.

Shortly after the 1946 release of the Howard Hawks film version of Chandler's The Big Sleep, he wrote to his English publisher Hamish Hamilton: "When and if you see The Big Sleep (the first half of it at least), you will realize what can be done with this sort of story by a director with the gift of atmosphere and the requisite touch of hidden sadism. Bogart, of course, is also so much better than any other tough-guy actor that he makes bums of the Ladds and the Powells."

No other actor is so firmly associated with the hardboiled image of a shamus in a trench coat than Humphrey Bogart. A singular fact that takes on added meaning when you consider he is the only actor to play two of detective literature's greatest creations on screen. The first was as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) from Dashiell Hammett's masterpiece, and five years later in The Big Sleep where Bogart personified Philip Marlowe. Other films contributed to this image, of course, but those two are unparalleled in film history.

Bogart's most memorable films add to his legend as a tough guy: In The Petrified Forest (1933) he steals the show as Duke Mantee, an escaped convict on the road to oblivion; and in dozens of other crime pictures he exemplified the definition of "menace." Any retrospective should include San Quentin (1937); Dead End (1937); The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) – here Bogart plays a safecracker named Rocks Valentine; Racket Busters (1938); Angels with Dirty Faces (1938); King of the Underworld (1939); and The Roaring Twenties (1939).

Director Vincent Sherman summed up Bogart's work ethic when I interviewed him a number of years ago: "Bogie came from the theatre, and all of us who came from the theatre were dedicated, hard workers." Bogart knew his lines, came to work on time, and got along with most everybody. Vincent Sherman confirmed what I had heard before: "He was a very disciplined actor, hard working, and a wonderful guy to work with." But there is another side of Bogart, too; the tough guy aspect of his personality that was so apparent to Raymond Chandler. He was at times a brawler and a boozer. Life Magazine photographer Peter Stackpole told me an anecdote about the Warner Brothers publicity tour for an Errol Flynn picture. Bogart wasn't in the picture, but as was required by their contracts, the available studio repertoire made publicity tours, often by train, for various productions. "Bogart got in a fight with his wife," Stackpole told me, "He chased her three train lengths back to their bedroom and she slid the door right into his face and gave him a couple of shiners. So when he arrived in Hollywood he was wearing very dark glasses."

The marriage of "The Battling Bogarts" (as the press called them) ended shortly after he met a beautiful young actress named Lauren Bacall. For Bogart, this coltish beauty was the stuff dreams were made of.

He could be insipid, laconic, and witty in the same breath. And he sometimes said things to upset people simply to gauge their reactions. Bogart once said to writer John Steinbeck: "Hemingway tells me you're not all that good a writer." And he once looked at Frank Sinatra and said: "They tell me you have a voice that makes girls faint. Make me faint."

But as it so often does, the final word belongs to Raymond Chandler, a somewhat lonely yet brilliant writer who favored a pipe and wore horn-rimmed glasses giving him the look of a wizened, bemused owl: "He has a sense of humor that contains the grating undertone of contempt. Ladd is hard, bitter and occasionally charming, but he is after all a small boy's idea of a tough guy. Bogart is the genuine article."

A slightly different version was originally published in "Mystery News" 1999