Cast opposite Bette Davis once more, in the efficient and forgettable Marked Woman, Humphrey played a crusading district attorney. Kid Galahad found him in a struggle with Edward G. Robinson over a prizefighter whose future they both want to control. At the predictable bloody finale they gun each other down. In San Quentin, Humphrey is a convict in the high-security penitentiary. Informed that a yard captain (Pat O’Brien) is romancing his sister, he escapes and tries to slay the uniformed Romeo. Instead, he himself is fatally shot.
Stand-In was one of Humphrey’s rare ventures into comedy. As a boozy producer who produces schlock films like Sex and Satan, he mistreats employees and gives a hard time to the lead, Leslie Howard, who heads a revolution against the studio. Leslie and Humphrey would never make another film together. In The Ultimate Bogart, Ernest W. Cunningham notes that director Tay Garnett thought a change of pace might be beneficial for Humphrey. Things didn’t work out as he expected. Viewing some daily footage, an assistant complained about Bogart’s diction: “The son of a bitch lisps!”
There were odd B pictures like Crime School, in which Humphrey plays a decent man attempting to clean up a brutal reformatory. In The Oklahoma Kid he’s a two-dimensional villain, outfitted entirely in black, tracked down and slain by an upright James Cagney. In Black Legion, an intelligent exposé of the Ku Klux Klan, he plays Frank Taylor, an ambitious worker who gets passed over for promotion. The man who gets the job has an Eastern European name, fueling Taylor’s rage and resentment. He’s ripe for a xenophobic message delivered via radio: “We the challengers have raised our rallying cry: ‘America for Americans’ … the real, one hundred percent Americans must stop and think. He who is not with us is against us.” Taylor passes the word to his young son (“Listen to this guy—he’s talking sense!”), blames the long lines of unemployed on “foreigners,” and becomes a hooded and murderous fascist. Caught by police, he gets nailed with a life sentence. Critics were impressed: the film was compared favorably with Paul Muni’s 1933 social-conscience shocker, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. The Hollywood Reporter predicted that Legion was “almost certain to make a top-flight character star out of Humphrey Bogart,” and the New York Post raved, “No more B-pix for Bogart!”
The tabloid had a clouded crystal ball. Humphrey’s next picture, a Bette Davis vehicle called Dark Victory, miscast him as a philosophical horse trainer with an Irish brogue. Oddly enough, the picture boosted his career. In the opinion of the New York Post reviewer, “After a while you stopped expecting Bogart to whip out a rod. You accepted him as a horse trainer. That’s acting.” Warners also liked what Humphrey did in Victory and offered him the lead opposite Davis in her next film, The Old Maid, a Civil War picture. But on the fourth day of shooting he was replaced by George Brent. According to Charles Higham, Davis’s biographer, at a farewell scene in a railroad station, Humphrey was so hopeless, “so thin and pathetic in his uniform and so unromantic in his last wave goodbye, that Warner demanded that he be fired.” Producer Hal Wallis was “forced to tell him that he was dismissed forthwith. He stalked off in a rage.” For the next few years, when audiences spotted the name Humphrey Bogart in the credits they expected to see a gangster movie. Warner Bros. saw to it that they were not disappointed.
There were Racket Busters, with Humphrey as a powerful thug; King of the Underworld, with Humphrey in the title role; Angels with Dirty Faces, featuring Humphrey as a dishonest lawyer; The Roaring Twenties, with Humphrey as a scheming bootlegger; You Can’t Get Away with Murder, in which he played a latter-day Fagin, introducing boys to a life of crime. The archetype casting became so obvious that in March 1939, the New York Times complained that such “valuable stock players” as Humphrey Bogart were “held not so much by five-year contracts, as by five-year sentences.”
And yet in all this celluloid waste, two features glinted. Warners loaned Humphrey out to the Goldywn studio for one picture, Dead End. The studio negotiations clearly reveal the actor as indentured servant. Humphrey’s contract called for him to be paid $650 a week. Warners offered him to Goldwyn for $2,000 a week, with a guaranteed minimum of five weeks. Thus Humphrey would get $3,250 for his work, and Warners would grab $6,750 for doing nothing at all.
Sidney Kingsley’s play had been adapted for the screen by Lillian Hellman. It boasted phosphorescent photography by Gregg Toland, later the cinematographer of Citizen Kane; and it was sharply directed by William Wyler. Even though Joel McCrae was the nominal star, Humphrey made the film his own. As Baby Face Martin, he was far from the standard lowlife of so many previous movies.
Kingsley was not known for his subtlety: in the roiled world of Depression New York, the privileged folks of Dead End live cheek by jowl with the poor. The contrasts are heavily stressed, particularly when two boyhood friends meet after a separation of decades. Dave Connell (McCrae) has become an architect who wants to redesign the slums. Baby Face has taken the low road, succumbing to the temptations of violence and dirty money. The movie launched the careers of half a dozen youths who went on to play virtually the same sassy punks in a series of low-budget features, variously billed as the Dead End Kids, the Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and the Bowery Boys. But it was the adult confrontations that made the film a standout. When Martin returns to see his mother (played with stark authority by Marjorie Main), she speaks of the shame he has brought her and withers him with a glare. He finds no surcease when he tracks down his old girlfriend Francey (Claire Trevor). Now a prostitute, Francey echoes Mrs. Martin’s contempt—except that she’s dying of syphilis. The woman who calls herself a “broken-down hoor” barely has the strength to face him down. Francey’s physical deterioration seems a direct parallel to his moral one; Martin escapes from her sickly stare, but he cannot run from himself and ends in the gutter, slain by Connell.
There is tragic poetry in these scenes, thanks to Humphrey’s charismatic on-screen presence. He’s gritty, ruined, dangerous, and wholly believable. Small wonder that the film was praised in America and that it did even better in Britain. Novelist Graham Greene, then a film critic for the Spectator, wrote, “This is the finest performance Bogart has ever given—the ruthless sentimentalist who had melodramatized himself from the start.” Had there been any justice in Hollywood, Dead End would have been Humphrey’s breakthrough.
But Warners had other plans. The studio’s homecoming gift to Humphrey Bogart was a role as a wrestling promoter in Swing Your Lady. The raucous hillbilly comedy ran a mercifully brief seventy-nine minutes and expired at the box office. Humphrey did a little better in They Drive by Night, the story of two brothers in the trucking business. But the star of that film was George Raft, a journeyman ex-hoofer with a distinctly urban style. Ann Sheridan provided the glamour and Ida Lupino received an Academy Award nomination for her mad scene in a courtroom. Humphrey faded into the background as a pathetic loser whose arm is amputated in a truck accident.
There was one other distinguished Humphrey Bogart film in this period—and it was never planned to be a Bogart picture at all. Raft had been given a big buildup by the studio—so big that he had come to believe the hype manufactured by his press agent and the studio publicity department. In 1939 he sent a letter of complaint to Jack Warner, reminding the mogul of a promise: “I was afraid the studio would put me in parts that Humphrey Bogart should play and you told me that I would never have to play a Humphrey Bogart part.” Jack Warner knew better than to force the issue. He sent the script of High Sierra to Paul Muni. The vain and much-lauded actor turned it down cold. He had no interest in playing Roy “Mad Dog” Earle. Or, for that matter, in appearing in any gangster film, even one removed from the usual urban background and placed in the bleak Sierra mountains. Biographies like the Academy Award—nominated Story of Louis Pasteur and Life of Emile Zola were more his style nowadays.
Humphrey took advantage of their disdain for High Sierra. As soon as he learned that Raft and Muni were out of the picture, he telegraphed Wallis: “Dear Hal: You once told me
to let you know when I found a part I wanted.” The part was Roy Earle. Wallis accommodated him.
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In many ways it was High Sierra, rather than Petrified Forest, that truly and finally turned things around. The screenplay was an adaptation of W. R. Burnett’s elegiac crime novel. Burnett got credit as co-writer, but the sharpest work was done by John Huston, son of the veteran actor Walter Huston. At the age of thirty-four John had a series of successful collaborations behind him, including the scripts for Jezebel and Sergeant York. He had learned how to pare a book down to its essentials, retaining only the most vital, pivotal scenes and conflict’s. In Huston’s hands Earle became a symbol of 1920s excess, an Indiana farm boy (as was John Dillinger) who had turned bad during the Prohibition era. He had robbed, killed, gotten arrested, and gone to prison. Paroled, he returned to the gangster life only to find himself obsolete and unwanted, a man outside his time. The difference between this felon and the ones in standard celluloid melodramas was his deep feelings for rural America, for animals and damaged people. Huston’s script offered a look at the protagonist’s inner life, making Earle sympathetic without exonerating him.
Wallis had misgivings about High Sierra; a noble crook was not something he wished to endorse. Then Mark Hellinger took over the producer’s chores. A dynamic New York journalist turned Hollywood producer, Hellinger had come up with the idea for The Roaring Twenties, one of the first gangster films. Back in Manhattan he had cultivated a great many racketeers, and liked to emulate their style. He wore flashy suits, blue shirts, and white ties even on the hottest Los Angeles days, and let everyone know that his big car was once owned by the murdered bootlegger Dutch Schultz. Hellinger was an old friend of Humphrey’s from the speakeasy days. From a distance he had watched both phases of the Bogart film career, took delight in the complexities of Duke Mantee, but had no use for the slew of B movies that demanded so little of Humphrey’s talent.
Hellinger talked up the feature, protecting Huston and director Raoul Walsh from front-office memos. He did what he could for Humphrey as well, but lost the battle to give him star billing. There were two reasons for the failure. Wallis pointed out that Bogart had been in too many second features, and would not be a box office draw; ergo, Humphrey’s comely co-star, twenty-two-year-old Ida Lupino, deserved the top billing. But there was a hidden cause, left undiscussed. Martin Dies Jr., a Republican congressman from Texas, had chosen this moment to investigate the “subversive element” in Hollywood. Y. Frank Freeman, president of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, appeared at the congressman’s hotel room along with select members of the press. There he stated that filmmakers would “not yield to anyone in their true Americanism.” Meantime, in Philharmonic Hall, Dorothy Parker spoke to a group of self-styled “progressives.” Addressing the congressman from afar, she shouted defiantly: “You’re out here, Mr. Dies … because you’ve got to control this medium if you want to bring fascism to this country.” Dies responded in the newspapers, claiming that he wanted nothing of the kind. All he wanted to do was conduct a few interviews, ask a few questions.
With the help of a local district attorney, Dies found just the man he needed to justify his probe. John L. Leech had been an executive secretary of the Communist Party in Los Angeles. His fellow members had expelled him in 1937 for unstable behavior, but this personal history was of no interest to Dies. He induced Leech to testify before a grand jury, telling the empaneled citizens what he had told the congressman: there were dangerous Communists in the film colony, and he was willing to name names. Franchot Tone, for example. And Fredric March. And Humphrey Bogart, who, Leech claimed, had been a member of a “subversive academy” and had attended a secret meeting at the Malibu home of Paramount production chief B. P. Schulberg. There, he and others had “studied the doctrines of Karl Marx.”
These men and others were duly summoned to testify on their own behalf. As they did, Leech was exposed as a charlatan by investigative reporters for the Los Angeles Times; according to their information, he had invented the allegations out of whole cloth. Vindicated, Humphrey defended himself in a brief, pugnacious statement.
“I have never contributed money to a political organization of any form. That includes Republican, Democratic, Hollywood Anti-Nazi League or the Communist Party. Furthermore, I have never attended the school mentioned nor do I know what school that may be.
“I dare the men who are attempting this investigation to call me to the stand. I want to face them myself and not by a proxy to whom I am only a name.”
Dies granted a private hearing, where Humphrey again aired his resentment. He began by denying that he knew any card-carrying members of the Party, and finished by stating that it was “completely un-American” to allow Leech, a man accused of lying on more than one occasion, “to be allowed to testify before a grand jury without the accused being permitted to have an opportunity to answer those charges.” Without quite apologizing, Dies put out the word that Mr. Bogart and the others had been “very frank and submitted their books and records for our inspection.” Said inspection “showed that they are not and never have been Communist sympathizers.” Humphrey washed his hands of the whole business and went to work, convinced that he could handle these Washington headline hunters with his hands tied behind his back. But the damage had already been done. Too much bad attention had been directed at Humphrey Bogart. The studio felt that giving him top billing would only invite trouble.
With his marriage deteriorating and his career on hold, Humphrey took to drinking before noon, then griping about the script to anyone who would listen—principally the director. Raoul Walsh was his kind of guy: he had roped cattle in the West, acted onstage in New York, switched to celluloid, apprenticed himself to D. W. Griffith, who taught him how to make movies, played the young Pancho Villa in a biography of the Mexican general (Villa played himself in the later scenes), and mastered an astonishing variety of styles, from fantasy (The Thief of Bagdad, with Douglas Fairbanks Sr.) to swashbuckling adventure (They Died with Their Boots On, with Errol Flynn) to crime epic (White Heat, with James Cagney). He had lost an eye making one film and wore a black eyepatch, making him the most recognizable nonactor in Hollywood. He was not about to be intimidated by Humphrey Bogart, but he was not about to bully him, either; Walsh was too shrewd for that.
“When Bogart had one too many,” the director recalled, “he used to come in and complain about his lines. ‘What a load of garbage, that script.’ ‘But you approved it,’ I answered. ‘I must have been drunk. You’ll change that for me, won’t you?’ I changed a couple of lines and he was happy and we could start working again.”
The producer, director, and screenwriter discussed tactics, each conversing privately with Humphrey, urging him to make Earle a credible, innately decent soul. Their strategy worked. “Bogart was a medium-sized man,” Huston recalled, “not particularly impressive offscreen.” But something happened when he came on as Roy Earle. “Those lights and shadows composed themselves into another, nobler personality: heroic.” In High Sierra the camera had “a way of looking into a person and perceiving things the naked eye doesn’t register.”
Added to this was the influence of a writer who had nothing to do with the script, but whose outlook and technique could be felt in every scene. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places,” he had written. “But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
In an appraisal of Ernest Hemingway, critic Edmund Wilson pointed out that the author had “expressed with genius the terrors of modern man at the danger of losing control of his world.” At the same time, Hemingway provided an antidote. Though his heroes are preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with physical contests, they’re “almost always defeated physically, nervously, practically; their victories are moral ones.” This approac
h was apparent in Burnett’s imitative prose style, and in the “virile ugliness” of the main character. Huston amplified Hemingway’s tough-minded masculine approach, and Walsh and Bogart took it from there.
For a gangster film, High Sierra has an unusually sensitive opening. After establishing shots of a foreboding prison, the parolee gets into a car. Rather than be driven directly to his destination, “Mad Dog” demands to be taken to a park, where he gets out and strolls along, carefully noticing the things that have been missing from his life for ten years: the sky, the grass, trees, birds. Only then can he continue the journey. Earle has been sprung from jail early, not for good behavior, but because a crime boss has suborned a corrupt prison official. He wants the experienced Earle to lead a million-dollar hotel heist. Roy follows instructions, taking a long, circuitous drive to a camp in the Sierra mountains. There he meets the men who will abet him in the robbery. Mendoza and Red (Cornel Wilde and Arthur Kennedy in early roles) seem reliable enough. A third man, Babe (Alan Curtis), has brought along a woman, Marie (Ida Lupino). Roy regards him as trouble and her as bad luck. But Marie is both tough and flirtatious; she persuades the feisty Mad Dog to keep her on.
During the weeks that Roy plans the robbery, a stray canine named Pard (actually Humphrey’s own dog Zero) adopts him and Marie falls in love with him. But Roy has eyes for another, a sweet-faced, clubfooted young woman named Velma (Joan Leslie) he met on the drive to the hideout. One afternoon Roy gathers his remaining cash, drives down the mountain, and funds an expensive operation. When it cures Velma’s limp, Roy asks the grateful girl for her hand. But a new Velma now emerges, conniving and self-involved. She spurns the offer; while she was recuperating she met a man her own age and they got engaged. Roy meets the unprepossessing and vulgar fiancé. With something more than jealousy, he loathes the man on sight. Bitter but resigned, in the manner of a Hemingway protagonist, Roy accepts the decision and hooks up with Marie. As it turns out, this lady has more dignity and class than Velma. But she has brought bad luck with her. In the midst of the robbery a security guard wanders in. Shots are fired. Red and Babe attempt to flee but crack up their car. The police close in on Mendoza. Terrified, he rats out his companions.
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