Roy puts Marie and Pard on a bus to Las Vegas, then lights out for the Sierras, hoping the cops will pass by. Not a chance. A dragnet has been set up, and Roy is soon tracked down by the police. On the bus, Marie hears a radio broadcast, outlining the situation. (“It is some five hours since Roy Earle took cover on the rock and there is no indication on his part to surrender.”) She and Pard get off and reverse direction. Arriving at the foot of the mountain, she’s spotted by a reporter. He spills her location to the police. They ask Marie to shout out to the fugitive, pleading with him to surrender before it’s too late. She refuses and, just after sunrise, sharpshooters climb the mountain. As Pard barks below, Roy Earle emerges from his hideaway for the last time, aware that Marie is within earshot. As he calls out to her, a rifleman shoots him in the back. Pard licks his dead owner’s hand. Marie weeps for a moment, then straightens up. Her lover has the one thing he wanted all along: freedom.
Theoretically this was just another violent and sentimental gangster movie, with the villain getting his just deserts at the end. As it turned out, though, High Sierra became an important piece of Hollywood history: it marked the sunset of the gangster genre. The film was released in 1941. World War II approached, and larger and more threatening villains than John Dillinger and Al Capone had risen to power overseas. But it had a professional significance as well. High Sierra marked the last time Humphrey Bogart failed to receive first billing. His performance was too impressive to ignore. Belmont Bogart had been wrong: it wasn’t the sea that would be his son’s Yale and Harvard, it was second-rate movies. Without being aware of it, Humphrey had been in training for the role of “Mad Dog” Earle, paying his dues, learning his lines, honing his skills, digging into his characters’ psyches. All the years of B pictures, all the violent deaths he suffered in melodramatic parts, all the semiliterate scripts and fights with Warners, led up to this role, and he was more than equal to the challenge. As the ill-fated Earle, Humphrey could easily have overemphasized the character’s hard-boiled aspects, or his softheartedness. But he never asked for the viewers’ sympathy. They knew he was a killer with a dark and brutal past—he was dubbed “Mad Dog” for a reason—but they liked him anyway. Partly, of course, it was because of his charitable gestures. But mostly it was because Humphrey brought a reality to a bad man capable of humane acts, a puzzling figure who, in other circumstances, might have been someone worth saving.
His body language, as well as his facial expressions, registers shock when reporters label him “Mad Dog.” He never thinks of himself that way, and indeed regards the little mongrel as his only friend. He’s kind to a taxi dancer who briefly becomes his lover, and goes out of his way to help a crippled girl—one of those deeds that do not go unpunished. For all his heists, the only thing Roy Earle has ever wanted is liberty. Sarcasm doesn’t get him anywhere; neither does pity. His salvation comes only at the close, when on a lonely mountain peak he escapes his pursuers for good.
The film was a bona fide hit across the country with critics and moviegoers. Other studios asked to borrow Humphrey for their features. Fox and MGM guaranteed star billing. Universal even wanted him to co-star in My Little Chickadee alongside Mae West and W. C. Fields. Humphrey was in demand for radio dramas, product endorsements (shirts, chocolates, cigarettes), and personal appearances.
Nathaniel Benchley remembered one such appearance at a Broadway movie palace. Humphrey’s act began right after one of his death scenes was shown on-screen. When the houselights were turned on, the audience saw him lying prone on the stage. He got up, remarked, “It’s a hell of a way to make a living,” wiped his hands on his trousers, and spoke a few prepared words. “It was the first time most people had seen the cheerful side of him, and the effect was startling. Hordes of people, the majority of them women, mobbed his dressing room door.”
The success of High Sierra could well have meant disaster for Humphrey. For if this was to be the finale of a genre, where would he go? Just past his fortieth birthday, underweight and balding, he was not handsome, like Tyrone Power or Robert Taylor or Clark Gable or any of the other leading men of the early 1940s. Nor could he bring off sophisticated comedy in the manner of Cary Grant or William Powell. Nor could he be a folk hero along the lines of Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper. Nor could he sing or dance. With the demise of the gangster film, what parts were open to such an incomplete actor?
Humphrey’s very next film indicated how dire his situation was. The Wagons Roll at Night cast him as Nick Coster, owner of a squalid traveling carnival. Eddie Albert plays Matt, a naïve lion tamer who makes a near-fatal mistake: he falls for the owner’s overprotected sister Mary (Joan Leslie, in another virginal role). When the lions turn feral, Nick forces Matt to go in and calm the big cats. It amounts to murder, and when Mary sees what’s happening she begs her brother to intervene. Guiltily, Nick enters the cage, rescues Matt, and gets clawed to death. This was the nadir of Humphrey’s Warners period; it was as if the door had been opened and then, just as he was about to cross the threshold, slammed shut. And in addition to his fading marriage, he had a new sorrow: on November 22, 1940, Maud died after a long battle with cancer. Humphrey memorialized her with the line “She died as she had lived. With guts.” But he also grumbled that “cruel as it may sound, Maud was not a woman one loved. For such was her drive, her singleness of purpose, that none of us could really get at her.”
He and his mother had never been simpatico. Maud’s only son had been harboring resentments from early childhood onward, and now they asserted themselves. She had been one of the most famous commercial illustrators of the early twentieth century, and a lifelong advocate of women’s rights. Yet on her death certificate, Humphrey listed the deceased’s occupation simply as “housewife.” In their book, Maud’s biographers wonder, “What was Humphrey Bogart’s motive for this written ‘slap in the face,’ for even in her retirement Maud had still been painting?” No one could say for certain, least of all Humphrey himself.
His sullen mood was not improved by the reviews of Wagons. The Times assessment said it best: “Nothing at all can be said for the definitely unoriginal plot; Mr. Bogart is badly hampered in a ridiculously fustian villain role. Except for the lions and Mr. Albert, The Wagons Roll at Night is honky-tonk.” The News reported that showings at the Strand Theater had been greeted with catcalls and raspberries.
Warners was of no help at all. A picture called Out of the Fog, based on Irwin Shaw’s play The Gentle People, was ready to go. It concerned the lives of simple folk, brutalized by a thief who squeezes them for money. Ida Lupino had already been cast as the female lead, and Humphrey saw himself playing opposite her as he had in High Sierra. He thought Lupino had liked working with him in that picture. He was wrong. She told Warners that she didn’t want Bogart as her co-star, and John Garfield got the role.
Then came Manpower. Warners assigned Humphrey to the picture, along with George Raft and Marlene Dietrich. Then Raft did a little backstairs politicking. Humphrey was removed from the cast. He asked around, then sent a carefully worded telegram to Hal Wallis informing him that he was EXTREMELY UPSET. It continued: I TRIED TO GET GEORGE TO TELL ME THIS MORNING WHAT HE WAS ANGRY ABOUT BUT HE WOULDN’T TELL ME. I FEEL VERY HURT BY THIS BECAUSE IT’S THE SECOND TIME I HAVE BEEN KEPT OUT OF A GOOD PICTURE AND A GOOD PART BY AN ACTOR’S REFUSING TO WORK WITH ME.
Unresponsive, the studio gave the role to Edward G. Robinson, and as an added insult assigned Humphrey to play Cole Younger in a Western called Bad Men of Missouri. He took one look at the script and shot off a note to the casting department: “Are you kidding—this is certainly rubbing it in—since Lupino and Raft are casting pictures, maybe I can.” Smoldering, he clambered aboard his yacht Sluggy and took her out to sea where he would be unreachable. Five days later, the studio placed him on suspension. Jack Warner was adamant—no salary, no side income from radio programs or personal appearances, no future movies until Bogart capitulated. The capable journeyman Dennis Morgan was cast as C
ole Younger, and Humphrey went back to cruising the Pacific. If there was a way out of this impasse, no one could see it.
CHAPTER 3
Incorrodible as a Zinc Bar
i
At the time of Bogart’s suspension, the United States was suffering from a kind of bipolar affliction. On one hand the nation struggled with the effects of the Crash. By the late 1930s unemployment approached 15 percent. Isolationist senators eyed the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe, read of the collapse and surrender of France and the Nazi attack on Britain, and declared it was none of America’s business. Washington, D.C., trumpeting its status as the nation’s capital, was actually a southern tank town. It had fifteen thousand privies, numerous murders, unsafe streets. In 1939 the black opera diva Marian Anderson was barred from singing in Constitution Hall, and the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, had to make private arrangements so that Anderson’s concert could take place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
On the other hand, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had firmly taken over the machinery of government and energized the labor force. He decided to run for an unprecedented third term and had little trouble defeating his Republican challenger, Wendell Willkie. Unions, ethnic groups, and the Solid South all got behind him. Over the protests of the America First Committee, including Charles Lindbergh and a group of midwestern senators, the Selective Service Act was passed. Lend-Lease aid to Britain and the Soviet Union began to flow, giving those beleaguered nations weapons for the war with Germany. U.S. factories began to retool for what was termed “defense purposes,” and the gross national product jumped from $866.5 billion in 1939 to 941.2 a year later. Unemployment started to drop. The decrease would continue.
Even during the Depression’s deepest troughs, people felt a great need to get away from their troubles for a few hours. The big studios had flourished in those worst of times. Now that the United States stood on the edge of global conflict, moviemakers were ready to prosper yet again. The problem was selecting the right material. It was a bit too early for international political satire (though Charlie Chaplin had mocked Hitler in The Great Dictator and Ernst Lubitsch had made a mockery of Nazism in To Be or Not to Be), and not quite time for full-out war pictures. A middle way had to be found.
In 1940 the big studio productions reflected this contradiction. Several chose to take a look at U.S. history in the rearview mirror (Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Knute Rockne: All American, The Grapes of Wrath). Others ignored current events in favor of screwball comedies (My Favorite Wife, Great McGinty, His Girl Friday). Still others concentrated on melodrama, aiming principally for a female audience (Kitty Foyle; The Letter; All This, and Heaven Too). As they prepared for 1941, none of the moguls was secure enough to say exactly what the American moviegoer was looking for. In such a climate Humphrey needed a miracle. He got two of them.
He was taken off suspension, thanks in part to some interference by the woman they called (behind her back) the Gay Illiterate. The subject of much loathing, fear, and genuflection, Louella Parsons had worked her way up from hack journalist in Chicago to failed scenarist to dictatorial Hollywood gossip columnist, thanks to the backing of press lord William Randolph Hearst. She had taken a shine to Humphrey, and decided his dry, instantly recognizable voice would enliven her radio show, Hollywood Hotel, a program crammed with celebrities. But there was no way he could go on the air if he was suspended. Louella put some pressure on Warners, and since they had already hung Humphrey out to dry for two months, they relented and placed him back on the payroll.
Miracle two came from a familiar source. George Raft, ever fixated on George Raft, sent another of his cranky memos to Jack Warner, complaining about an upcoming film. “As you know,” he wrote, “I strongly feel that The Maltese Falcon, which you want me to do, is not an important picture and, in this connection, I must remind you again, before I signed the new contract with you, you promised me that you would not require me to perform in anything but important pictures.…” Again Warner backed off, selecting a substitute who had just been chastened and who was unlikely to give the studio any more trouble. Besides, he was reminded, there was Humphrey’s personal appearance in New York, during which hordes of people, the majority of them women, mobbed his dressing room door.…
Despite Raft’s petulant tone, he had a valid argument. Dashiell Hammett’s novella The Maltese Falcon had already been filmed twice, both times with Hammett as co-scenarist. In 1931 it went out under the original title, with Bebe Daniels as the villainess and Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, private eye. Five years later Falcon was remade as Satan Met a Lady, with Bette Davis as the bad girl and Warren William as an unsubtly lascivious gumshoe. Neither one thrived. The third version would be in the hands of a thirty-five-year-old screenwriter making his directorial debut. Raft didn’t trust John Huston, and Huston didn’t care much for Raft. “So I fell heir to Bogie,” Huston remembered, “for which I was duly thankful.”
The reunion of actor and director was social as well as professional. Both enjoyed knocking back a few drinks after work, and sometimes before it. Both considered themselves “men’s men,” tough-minded personalities who bucked authority, talked intelligently on a variety of subjects, worked professionally, and held their liquor. There was no sense of competition; they were anxious to get on with the show.
It took a while for matters to coalesce. Geraldine Fitzgerald was up for the part of the pathological liar Ruth Wonderly (a.k.a. Brigid O’Shaughnessy), but she had other commitments. This time it was Mary Astor’s turn to be duly thankful. The actress had been in movies since the age of eighteen; she had played opposite Clark Gable in Red Dust and John Huston’s father, Walter, in Dodsworth. In the Bette Davis vehicle The Big Lie, it was Astor who would get an Academy Award for her performance as an ambitious, egomaniacal concert pianist. She considered Huston’s script for Falcon “a humdinger,” and lobbied for the part of the manipulative leading lady. Perhaps the most persuasive argument for hiring Astor was not her screen credits but her steamy affair with George S. Kaufman. In 1936, her then husband had discovered Mary’s diary, detailing romantic interludes with the playwright (“Ah desert night—with George’s body plunging into mine, naked under the stars …”). The marriage ended in a well-publicized divorce, and the quotes, played up in the tabloids, lent the pale, rather delicate-looking actress an intriguing glamour.
Huston was familiar with Sydney Greenstreet’s stage work: the stout actor had starred with Bob Hope in the Jerome Kern operetta Roberta, and toured with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the Robert Sherwood drama There Shall Be No Night. Huston saw him doing that play in Los Angeles and went backstage. The two struck up a friendship, and Greenstreet allowed himself to be persuaded to make his screen debut at the age of sixty-one. Casting for the other parts was a pleasure. Joel Cairo, the tightly closeted Levantine, would be played by Peter Lorre. At thirty-four, this sophisticated Hungarian refugee had already made nearly forty films, including M; Alfred Hitchcock’s international classic about a child killer, The Man Who Knew Too Much; and eight features in the role of Mr. Moto, a wily Japanese detective. Ward Bond, the bluff, hearty veteran of Westerns and gangster movies, would play a police detective, as would the reliable Bart MacLane. The undersized homosexual gunsel, Wilmer Cook, would be impersonated by Elisha Cook Jr., the least social of the group, as befit Wilmer’s alienated character. Elisha lived alone, way up in the Sierras, not unlike the fugitive Roy Earle, where he tied flies and fished for golden trout. He had no telephone; when studios wanted to reach him, they sent a man to his cabin.
What made this Falcon so different from its predecessors was not only the cast, but Huston’s unfailing attention to detail. He noted that “the book was told entirely from the standpoint of Sam Spade, and so too is the picture, with Spade in every scene except the murder of his partner. The audience knows no more and no less than he does.” Every bit of dialogue, much of it from the novella, was pared to the bone. During his youth Huston had take
n classes at the Art Students League; he knew how to render the look and feel of a room. “I made a sketch of each set-up,” he remarked in An Open Book, a memoir about his directorial debut. “If it was to be a pan or a dolly shot, I’d indicate it. I didn’t ever want to be at a loss before the actors or the camera crew.” He ran the sketches by his friend William Wyler, one of the premier Hollywood directors. Wyler was a Huston fan; he had brought him to Warners as a screenwriter. He offered a few suggestions, but by and large he liked what he saw. Just before the cameras began to grind, Falcon producer Henry Blanke whispered in John’s ear, “Just remember that each scene, as you shoot it, is the most important scene in the picture.” Huston considered his words “the best advice any young director could have.”
As much as possible the movie was shot in sequence, giving the actors the opportunity to maintain a rare consistency and intensity. On most sets, at the end of the business day the cast members scatter, heading for their homes or their cronies. Not so on Falcon. “We were all having such a good time,” Huston wrote in An Open Book, “that night after night after shooting, Bogie, Peter Lorre, Ward Bond, Mary Astor and I would go over to the Lakeside Club.” They’d have a few drinks and a buffet supper, often staying on until midnight. Ordinarily this sort of behavior was frowned on by production executives, particularly at Warners, where not a moment was supposed to be squandered. But it was all right this time; Falcon was actually running ahead of schedule. The only downer came when Astor attempted to keep up with the wisecracks exploding around her. “The kidding was turned on me unmercifully,” she remembered. “It was more than I could handle. Tears started popping and I whimpered, ‘I just can’t keep up with this!’ ” Humphrey wiped away her tears with his handkerchief and assured Astor that she was OK with the gang. She wasn’t as quick as Lorre or Huston or himself, but so what? “You know it, and what the hell’s wrong with that?” It was as close as he could come to an apology, she accepted it as such, and after that things were fine again.
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