Bogart

Books of The Times
Talent Is What Made Him Dangerous
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: February 14, 2011

He was the very image of the quintessential American hero — loyal, unsentimental, plain-spoken. An idealist wary of causes and ideology. A romantic who hid his deeper feelings beneath a tough veneer. A renegade who subscribed to an unshakeable code of honor.


Humphrey Bogart starred in “The Maltese Falcon” in 1941.

TOUGH WITHOUT A GUN

The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart

By Stefan Kanfer

288 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.


Excerpt: ‘Tough Without a Gun’ (February 14, 2011)


David Rogers
Stefan Kanfer
He was cool before cool became cool.

He looked good in a trench coat or a dinner jacket, and often had a cigarette in one hand or a glass of Scotch in the other. He could even make a bow tie or a fedora look hot. For legions of fans, he was a mensch in the fickle world of Hollywood — a man of his word and a consummate pro. Whatever he did he did well and with a minimum of fuss: no fancy words, no intellectual pretensions, just simple grace under pressure. The French tried to claim him as an existentialist and others described him as an old-fashioned stoic, but he would have dismissed such labeling with a sardonic wisecrack.

“He was a man who tried very hard to be Bad because he knew it was easier to get along in the world that way,” Peter Bogdanovich said. “He always failed because of an innate goodness which surely nauseated him.”

Katharine Hepburn said: “He walked straight down the center of the road. No maybes. Yes or no.”

Raymond Chandler said he could “be tough without a gun.”

More than a half-century after his death, Humphrey Bogart remains an iconic star and an enduring symbol — celebrated at college film festivals and revival movie theaters, and immortalized on a United States postage stamp. The American Film Institute named him the country’s greatest male screen star (Hepburn was its No. 1 actress), and Entertainment Weekly named him the top movie legend of all time.

Jean-Luc Godard and Woody Allen have paid tribute to him in movies, and so has Bugs Bunny. He’s been written about perceptively by critics like Kenneth Tynan and Richard Schickel. And he’s been the focus of memoirs by his wife Lauren Bacall and his son Stephen, as well as the subject of a wide array of biographies including a very well done 1997 volume by A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax.

So why another book on Bogart? Having written durable biographies of Groucho Marx and Marlon Brando, the critic Stefan Kanfer seems to have wanted to add Bogart to his portfolio of American originals. He doesn’t really contribute anything significantly new to the record, recycling lots of well known, much recounted stories about the actor’s life and work, and his effort to frame those stories by looking at the Bogart legend and its enduring power feels a little contrived: by now, dissections of Bogie’s on-screen and off-screen personas and his almost mythic aura are highly familiar too.

Still, for readers who simply can’t get enough of Bogart (or members of younger generations who have been dwelling in an Internet echo chamber somewhere), this is a perfectly engaging book. It does an evocative job of conveying Bogart’s uncommon and enduring mystique, and it gives the reader a palpable sense of the sadly truncated arc of his life.

Mr. Kanfer briskly sketches in Bogart’s upper-class upbringing in New York, the son of a prominent physician, who became addicted to morphine, and a well-known illustrator, who was an ardent feminist. Young Humphrey, we’re reminded, was a rebellious, alienated adolescent — think a World War I-era Holden Caulfield — who bounced from one private school to another, eventually getting thrown out of Phillips Andover because, Mr. Kanfer writes, “his grades had fallen so precipitously,” not as Andover legend has it, because he “had thrown grapefruits through the headmaster’s window."

After more or less stumbling into an acting career, Bogart served a lengthy apprenticeship, which for all its frustrations, helped fine-tune his craft. From early roles on Broadway playing juvenile, “tennis anyone?” types, he made his way to a succession of gangster roles in Hollywood. By one account, his first 45 movies had him getting hanged or electrocuted eight times, sentenced to life imprisonment nine times, and cut down by bullets a dozen times.

Bogart’s big break came when George Raft turned down starring roles in “High Sierra,” and then “The Maltese Falcon,” and from there, it was on to the movies with which he has become synonymous, including “Casablanca,” “To Have and Have Not,” “The Big Sleep” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

Of “Casablanca,” Mr. Kanfer writes: “It was, and would remain, a Humphrey Bogart movie because he was the one who furnished the work with a moral center. There was no other player who could have so credibly inhabited the role of Rick Blaine, expatriate, misanthrope, habitual drinker, and, ultimately, the most self-sacrificing, most romantic Hollywood hero of the war years. To watch him in this extraordinary feature was not only to see a character rise to the occasion. It was to see a performer mature, to become the kind of man American males yearned to be. When Humphrey Bogart started filming ‘Casablanca’ on May 25, 1942, he was a star without stature; when he finished, on August 1, he was the most important American film actor of his time and place.”

Although many readers might wish that Mr. Kanfer had spent more time explicating Bogart’s major work and less time plodding through a chronicle of his lesser films — his Brando biography suffered from a similar flaw — this volume nonetheless provides a conscientious chronicle of its subject’s evolution as a performer, and it leaves the reader with a haunting picture of Bogart’s brave struggle with esophageal cancer in the last year of his life.

In his eulogy of Bogart, who died at 57 in 1957, John Huston described the fountains of Versailles, where a sharp-toothed pike kept the carp active so that they never got fat and complacent. “Bogie,” he said, “took rare delight in performing a similar duty in the fountains of Hollywood,” adding, “he was endowed with the greatest gift a man can have: talent. The whole world came to recognize it .... We have no reason to feel sorry for him — only for ourselves for having lost him. He is quite irreplaceable.”