Humphrey Bogart

Dead Reckoning

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Lizabeth Scott and Humphrey Bogart stare straight into camera

Dead Reckoning cashes in on the Humphrey Bogart persona big time – a drawl and a rough and ready way with women but beneath it all a courtly gent with a thirst for truth. It was made in 1946 when peacetime mopping-up was the order of the day. War is over. Men are returning to where they came from. Things are going back to normal. Or that’s what’s meant to be happening, at any rate. As we meet Bogart’s Rip Murdock, he’s covered in blood, scared and on the run. If this is a reset then something has gone wrong. With plenty of voiceover from Bogart, and the useful shimmer of an extended … Read more

All Through the Night

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Jane Darwell with Humphrey Bogart

An entertaining fruit cocktail, All Through the Night was one of a raft of propaganda movies Hollywood made to try and turn isolationist American public opinion in favour of entering the Second World War. In the end it didn’t matter. By the time the film came out in early 1942, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler had declared war on the United States and President Roosevelt had decisively taken his fellow Americans into the fray. It’s a Warner Bros movie, full of Warner players, with Humphrey Bogart leading the pack as Gloves Donahue, a wiseguy gambler with a heart of gold, the sort of guy who makes a lot of money but is … Read more

The Harder They Fall

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Humphrey Bogart close up

The Harder They Fall is Humphrey Bogart’s farewell movie. He’d been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer not long before shooting started and knew he didn’t have long to live. Though he looks tired and ill, it doesn’t affect his performance. In fact it probably enhances it. Careworn individuals being something of a Bogart speciality. In a version of the character he’d been playing since The Maltese Falcon made him a superstar and Casablanca reinforced it, Bogart is a journalist down on his luck who is hired by a boxing promoter to puff his boy to the heavens and turn him into a champion. This in spite of the fact that the kid cannot fight, … Read more

High Sierra

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Roy and a bruised Marie eye each other

1941’s High Sierra was the last time Humphrey Bogart took second billing to anybody. It’s clearly his film yet Ida Lupino got top billing, playing a gangster’s moll. Neither the star nor the moll has very much to do and it’s pretty clear that Lupino’s part has been pumped up a bit to justify her position on the credits. As said, Bogart’s film, and it’s his character’s story too, the noirish, fatalistic tale of a life-serving criminal who is pardoned in the film’s opening moments. Which seems remarkable until we learn that a very big Mr Big in the criminal underworld wants Roy Earle (Bogart) on the outside so he can supervise a … Read more

They Drive by Night

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Cassie and Joe in a car together

A film about truckers that doesn’t quite deliver – bum tish – They Drive by Night is also very much a story heading off up one road only to take a sharp turn onto another. George Raft (top billed) and Humphrey Bogart (fourth billed) play Joe and Paul Fabrini, brothers who drive as a team of “wildcat” drivers. They don’t work for the man, like many truckers do. Instead they’re entrepreneurial go-getters financing their own rig, buying up loads of farm produce and then shipping it to market where they sell it. Or that’s the idea. In fact they don’t own their own rig but they are working their way towards it inch … Read more

Dark Passage

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Vincent Parry with his hands up

“Completely preposterous,” is how the Chicago Tribune described Dark Passage in its 1947 review. No argument here. But did Delmer Daves, who wrote the screenplay and directed this bizarre noir, simply make a bad film, or was he saying something about the latent absurdities of the genre, in particular the way fate operates in it? Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, an innocent man doing time in San Quentin for murdering his wife, who we first meet breaking out by stowing away in a garbage truck. He’s soon been picked up by a man who quickly works out who he is. Ructions follow, but Parry wins out, and is then picked up by the … Read more

Key Largo

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Nora and Frank

If you liked Humphrey Bogart’s cynical romantic Rick in Casablanca, Key Largo gives you another go around the track with him. And if you liked the dynamite pairing of Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep or Dark Passage, they get another outing too, in the last of the films they’d make together. He plays a major back from the war and in the sweltering Florida Keys on a courtesy visit to the father of one of his men, who died in the Italian campaign. But when Major Frank McCloud gets to the hotel owned by James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), he discovers that it’s been taken over by … Read more

The Big Sleep

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Boagart and Bacall sit on a desk

The older it gets, the better 1946’s The Big Sleep looks. When it was new, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s famously unfathomable story was rooted in reality – the clothes, the cars, the language, the streets of LA. Since then, as it’s become detached from the everyday, it has risen unimpeded into the mythic. The opening scene sets the tone. A detective, Philip Marlowe, arriving at the mansion of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), where the sick old man lives in an orchid house, staying alive on the heat, while his daughters run wild with his money. One of them, the general informs Marlowe, has got into some trouble. Can Marlowe fix it? That’s … Read more

The Maltese Falcon

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Joel Cairo is threatened by Sam Spade

Not a bad way to start. The Maltese Falcon, one of the most highly acclaimed films ever made, was John Huston’s directorial debut. He also wrote the screenplay, adapting Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled thriller into a lean piece of cinema that stands the test of time. In the 21st century if you want to watch something that’s a piece of surefire entertainment from front to back, The Maltese Falcon will not let you down. It’s a simple story, not really a story at all, more a contrivance just sturdy enough to hold together a series of interactions between people, about three desperados all in search of a fabulously ornate bejewelled bird – the so-called … Read more

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

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Bogart, Huston and Holt

By general consent a classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also won three Oscars – best director and screenplay for John Huston and best supporting actor for Walter Huston (his father) – and is one of those films that also get film-makers dewy eyed. Stanley Kubrick named it one of his faves (in 1963 anyway). Robert Redford ditto. Sam Peckinpah was a big fan. Lucas and Spielberg borrowed the look of its star, Humphrey Bogart, as the template for Indiana Jones. The hat, stubble, jacket, pants and boots all probably look better on Harrison Ford, but neither Bogart nor Huston Jr was aiming for matinee appeal with their movie, and that’s the … Read more