Bogart
By A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997. 676 pp., $39.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Humphrey Bogart's movie portrayal of the tough guy with the soft centre, the cynic who is capable of idealism, has made him one of the most popular film stars ever.
As Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, as Rick Blaine in Casablanca, as Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, as Frank McCleod in Key Largo, as Charlie Allnut in The African Queen, Bogart is the apolitical loner who eventually rises to the imperative of justice and a noble cause. He does the right thing and audiences loved him for it.
There was much of the screen Bogart in the real Bogart, as Sperber and Lax's biography reveals. Bogart was the thinking, reading, political actor who stood for liberal principles against the reactionary social agenda of the Republican right and who protested against the climate of fear spread by the postwar anticommunist witch-hunts.
Bogart, born in 1899, moved from the theatre to films in 1930. Working for Warner Brothers, his early diet was plateloads of B grade stodge. In his first 45 films, he played the tough guy who meets a violent end — hanged or electrocuted eight times, sentenced to life imprisonment nine times and riddled with a hail of bullets 12 times.
The political radicalism of the 1930s did not pass Bogart by. He supported striking lettuce workers and opened his chequebook for striking journalists. The FBI got alarmed and opened a file on him, and in 1940 the government's Special Committee on Un-American Activities grilled him about alleged Communist Party leanings. Whilst swearing his anticommunist credentials, Bogart told the committee where to get off.
The Maltese Falcon in 1941 made Bogart's name and Casablanca consolidated it. His Sam Spade was the tough yet vulnerable, reluctant but committed avenger of wrongdoing, as was his Rick Blaine, the self-pitying drunk who eventually acts on his conscience and confronts the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators in French Algeria.
Bogart continued to campaign at election times for Democrat presidential candidates, in the company of other Hollywood liberals such as Edward G. Robinson, Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx, Katherine Hepburn, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Ira Gershwin and James Cagney.
Bogart genuinely believed in the Democrat rhetoric of jobs, peace and racial equality. He was an outspoken radio critic of "racist bunk" and anti-Semitism, and he "raised hell" when white racists organised a petition against the black cabaret singer, Lena Horne, buying a house in their neighbourhood.
The height of Bogart's political activism was reserved for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) after the war. HUAC initially targeted Hollywood, concerned by the liberal, anti-fascist and pro-Soviet sensibility of the '30s and World War II which had "infected" actors, writers and directors.
Nineteen of the 41 named by HUAC as Communists refused to cooperate with the hearings on the grounds that the state had no role in investigating an individual's political beliefs or in censoring culture. When the hearings were called off half way through, q0 had been condemned by allegation in a mock trial, their careers in ruin.
With other Hollywood delegates, Bogart, and his new wife Lauren Bacall, who had burst into fame with Casablanca, flew to Washington to protest against the hearings. They were smeared by the press as defenders of "unfriendly witnesses" and accused of offering aid and comfort to Communism.
Bogart came under enormous pressure to recant his opposition to HUAC. Big capitalist investors in Warner Brothers now saw Hollywood's most popular actor as a liability to their profits and Bogart's liberal hero a mere step away from a dangerous symbol of socialism.
Under the threat of never working again, Bogart recanted. Bogart, who a few years earlier had said, "I'm going to keep right on sticking my neck out, without worrying about the possible effect on my career", now publicly recanted, claiming his trip to Washington was "ill advised", "foolish", "impetuous", a "mistake".
The movie industry, which could reward lavishly (Bogart was the most highly paid male actor in 1946 and a millionaire), could also punish severely. Bacall said that Bogart never felt good about his retraction, but he disappointed many and the US ruling class rejoiced.
Bogart's next film, Key Largo in 1948, sought to make amends by using gangsters as a metaphor for HUAC forcing obedience to the new right-wing political orthodoxy, who get their comeuppance at the hands of Bogart's Frank McCleod, a tired cynic who finds compassion, humanity and courage in the final reel. Most viewers, however, saw it as just a good gangster film.
The African Queen with Katherine Hepburn fired Bogart's last barrel, as a rum-soaked drifter who finds heroism. After helping to form the Rat Pack, whose aims "were to drink a lot of bourbon and stay up late", Bogart died from cancer in 1957.
The '60s radical folk singer, Phil Ochs, once defined a liberal as 10% to the left of centre in good times, 10% to the right when it affects them personally.
Bogart was a liberal, and his liberal politics failed the crunch in 1947 when his career was threatened, although he resisted harder and longer than many. Liberal politics may have been good enough for Bogart's celluloid heroes but they were not enough in the real world.
The tough-guy/soft-liberal paradox is at the heart of Bogart. Unfortunately, the biography by Sperber and Lax buries the political and social substance beneath tonnes of rubble from the saturation-level detail they conduct about the behind-the-scenes making of Bogart's films and who hurled what abuse and cutlery and chinaware at whom in Bogart's earlier marriage.
Bogart's liberal dream may have been inadequate, but his exceptional acting talent, his intelligence and his progressive political sympathies made for refreshing, even inspiring, films a cut above the Dream Factory's usual run of reactionary rubbish and morally bankrupt values.