Читать книгу The Times Great Lives - Anna Temkin - Страница 35

An actor of authority

14 January 1957

Mr Humphrey Bogart, the American actor, died yesterday in Hollywood. He was 57. For over 20 years – since his playing of the Dillinger-like part of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, which won him much praise – his seamed, sardonic cast of countenance and mordant tongue had been familiar to cinema audiences all over the world.

Bogart was born in New York on June 23, 1899, the son of Dr Belmont Bogart, a physician, and his wife, who as Maud Humphrey had made a name for herself as a watercolour artist and commercial illustrator. He was educated at Trinity School, New York, and at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, whence he was destined to go to Yale, but this intention was not fulfilled. The United States had entered the First World War and Bogart joined the Navy. He had always been attracted to the theatre and as soon as the war ended he joined the staff of a promoter of theatrical ventures as manager of a travelling company. But he was determined to act and made his way to New York, where he made his first appearance in 1922 in Drifting.

Thereafter he appeared regularly in plays and it was not until 1930 that he went to Hollywood. Of his first efforts he himself later said they were ‘a flop’. He returned to the stage and it was only after the success of the play The Petrified Forest that he again turned to the screen, to make an immediate impact with the film of the play with Leslie Howard and Miss Bette Davis.

There followed many other films, and notable among his earlier successes was Dead End, in which Bogart played the part of a gangster; and a gangster on the screen he often was, but a gangster with a difference. If Mr Clark Gable may be said to stand in the parts he plays for the uninhibited American male, the happy extrovert whom every college boy would wish to be, the lad for the girls and the lad for the liquor, Bogart represented a contrasting, yet allied, type of American hero.

He dwelt in the shadows and was on the other side, so far as the police and the law were concerned, but that was because the police and the law were themselves often shown as corrupt. He was the masculine counterpart of the girl of easy virtue who has a heart of gold. Typical was the role he played in The Big Shot. Here he was, of course, the ‘big shot’, the head of a gang which took beatings-up and murder in its stride, and yet at the end he gave himself up rather than see an innocent man, a man he did not even know, electrocuted. It is, of course, wildly improbable that the ‘big shot’ would do any such thing and, to make the climax convincing, some powerful acting would seem necessary. But that was not Bogart’s way. ‘He has charm and he doesn’t waste energy pretending to act,’ wrote James Agate. ‘He has a sinister-rueful countenance which acts for him. He has an exciting personality and lets it do the work.’

Certainly Bogart seemed to do little more than project his film personality on to the screen and leave it at that, but it was astonishing how much he could convey with a suggestion of pathos in that husky voice of his, with a shadow of a smile wryly turned against himself, and in films which gave him a chance, a film, for instance, such as John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, he showed that his acting could be positive even though it never moved far away from the essential Bogart.

Bogart appeared in a great number of films, among them High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Across the Pacific, The African Queen, To Have and Have Not, Casablanca, and The Caine Mutiny, and, while other reputations waxed and waned, he went on unchanged and unchangeable in calm, complete command of himself, the situation and the screen. He had what Kent found in Lear – authority.