Name: How Humphrey Bogart Became A Legend
Uploaded: 2026-02-02T17:01:46.000Z
Duration: 8 min 20 s
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Modal verbs - B1

It would have been impossible to guess at this moment in 1939 that Humphrey Bogart, here playing Dr.

Adverbs of degree

X in this really awful horror movie, would eventually become the most iconic actor in the history of the cinema.

By this point, Bogart had already made something like 40 films, most as a contract player for Warner Bros.

Warner cast him almost exclusively as villains, usually gangsters, in the gangster pictures that flourished in the 1930s.

Bogart was a constant presence in that decade, but a minor one.

It started with this movie, High Sierra, and

a leading role that Bogart's contemporary George Raft turned down because he was t of being typecast as a gangster.

The character was Mad Dog Roy Earl, a thief who's just been let out of jail and agrees to do one last job.

High Sierra is a kind of coda on the fading gangster era.

And maybe because he played so many of these characters, Bogart lends the perfect world weariness to a story that seems fated to end in tragedy.

Or at least you get the sense that he wants to believe there's something sympathetic in himself.

And even after all he's done, High Sierra was a hit.

And it began a new phase in Bogart's career.

Sorry I got up on my hind legs, boys, but

you fellas trying to rope me made me nervous.

Miles getting bumped off upset me and then you birds cracking foxy.

But it's alright now, now that I know what it's all about.

The same year he helped Hollywood say goodbye to the 30s gangster picture.

Bogart introduced the world to film noir with the Maltese Falcon.

This was the first of Bogart's truly iconic roles.

Sam Spade in John Huston's directorial debut.

And it was another part turned down by George Raft.

The only chance I've got of catching them and tying them up and bringing them in is by staying as far away as possible from you and the police, because you'd only gum up the works.

The character of the hard boiled, wise, cracking PI is archetypal.

Now it's thrilling to watch Bogart create it for the movies.

With the help of Houston's script from the Hammett novel and his inspired direction.

Bogey is the tough guy again, this time on the other side of the law.

But in Sam Spade, he finds another layer of vulnerability, especially in the astonishing final minutes.

You'll never understand me but I'll try once and then give it up.

See, Bogart's genius wasn't in his range.

And as a star of the golden era, he wasn't allowed it anyway.

But what Bogart lacked in variety, he made up for in depth.

He took the type he was so well known for, the cynical, the bruised, the world weary but still hopeful man and mined it.

A year after the Maltese Falcon in 1942, he starred in Casablanca.

And no one could have pulled off Rick Blaine.

The first half hour of the movie calls for him to be cold, bitter and generally unlikable.

Traits that ought to distance us from the character.

That's because he brings a naturalism to the part that enlivens the otherwise cliche elements of the story.

Only the topmost layer, concealing pain underneath.

And how does Bogart let us into this pain?

Through his eyes, without any action at all.

He's totally transparent to the viewer so that even the slightest twitch in his face feels like an earthquake.

With Casablanca, Bogart added romantic lead to his repertoire and he built on it in to have and have not, the first of four films with his future wife, Lauren Bacall.

Bogart wasn't the tall, handsome leading man like Cary Grant.

His face was lined with years of hard drinking.

Yet there's something attractive about a man whose coolness betrays an inner reservoir of feeling.

In the Big Sleep, he brings this romantic chemistry to another classic.

Perhaps I'm asking too much, although it doesn't seem too much to me somehow.

And it's a testament to Bogart's charisma and director Howard Hawks that a story which is famously incomprehensible is still compulsively watchable.

He won't monkey around with Fred C. Dobbs.

In the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Bogart finds another gear.

He plays a man prospecting for gold with two others.

They strike it rich, but greed and paranoia tear them apart.

I want to tell them you tied me to a tree and made your getaway, taking all the goods, yours, mine and His.

So they'll be looking for you and not me.

Well, this is a new kind of role for Bogart.

It's also a further exploration of the character he's been developing in Casablanca and his Bacall films.

The vulnerability he conceals under his tough guy shell emerges as love or compassion in Sierra Madre.

What's inside him eventually curdles and develops into madness and rage.

It's wonderful to feel her throat crush under your arm.

Things get even more disturbing in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place where Bogart plays a washed up, boom boozy screenwriter who's wrongly accused of murder.

You can see how the moral backbone of characters like Rick Blaine, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe kept them afloat, how hope provided stability.

Lose that and the cynicism starts to look a lot like sociopathy.

Self doubt becomes self hatred and that becomes a danger to others.

Bogart knew, perhaps from experience, how easy it is to fall on either side of the coin.