Saturday 11 September 2010

The Meaning of Bogart



Is the popularity of Humphrey Bogart currently languishing? In the 1960s, Bogey-worship reached cultish proportions. His persona – the romantic outsider – accorded perfectly with the iconoclastic spirit of youthful rebellion that characterised the 1960s. Having a poster of Bogart on the wall of one’s student bedsit was the modish cliché of the era – he was seen as a more cerebral, more mature James Dean-figure. It seems to me, however, that his iconic status and popularity are seriously diminishing.

He still has his adherents, but, like Existentialism and Northern Soul, he has been going out of fashion since his 60s zenith, even as his reputation as an actor amongst film buffs and critics remains very high, perhaps higher today than when he was alive. Go to a DVD shop, and you’re likely to find little else other than Casablanca and The African Queen. I’ve looked in many book-shops, but acquiring a biography of him is almost impossible without using the internet. You can find endless Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe box-sets in HMV, but Bogie ones are poorly stocked. Shockingly, many of my contemporaries have not even heard of him, or if they have, they have not seen many or any of his films.

This is a very unfortunate state of affairs. To me, Bogart’s work contains a core of moral seriousness, of meaning, that makes him indispensable, absolutely worthy of his iconic status. He is, to put it simply, one of the most compelling figures in the history of film.

Much of his worth, I think, stems from the distinctive ‘Bogie’ persona he crafted for himself, which shaped the scripts he was given and the direction of his films. He was one of very few actors who probably had as much impact on the nature of a picture as the director, simply because of his identity and style. What was this persona, and how did it shape the meaning of his great films? In short, what was the meaning of Bogart?

The first observation to make is that the Bogart persona evolved only gradually, and finds mature expression only in a fraction of the films he made overall. When Bogart first started appearing in films, he was a studio workhorse churning out whatever potboilers the studio demanded in order to earn a bare living. Only gradually did the studios and their writers and directors begin to realise that Bogart was at his most compelling playing certain kinds of roles in certain kinds of films. His partnership with director John Huston really began to draw the best out of him in films such as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo and The African Queen.

The Bogart persona is defined by two conflicting strands. The first and most obvious aspect of it is his cynicism and apparent selfishness. In film after film he plays characters who, at first sight, are basically jaded, who disclaim any idealistic or romantic notions, who have retreated to a position of self-interest and distrust; who are, in essence, out for themselves, having lost belief in anything bigger than their own individual desires.

The most famous example of this is the character of Rick in Casablanca, who initially tries to tread a path of neutrality between Vichy France/the Nazis, and the Resistance. He is, he proclaims, only interested in making money through his cafe, and, later on, in recapturing the heart of Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), with whom he previously had an affair in Paris. He claims that he has no interest in fighting the Nazis, and is not prepared to help Victor Laszlo (the fine Paul Henreid), heroic resistance leader and Ilsa’s husband, escape from the Nazis – in fact, he wants to use the letters of transit out of Casablanca that he has acquired to escape from Casablanca himself with Ilsa, whom he still loves. As Rick puts it, “I stick my neck out for nobody!”.

It gradually becomes apparent that Rick may not be the cynical bastard he initially appears to be. Laszlo points out that he ran guns to Ethiopia in 1935 to help in the fight against the fascist Italians, and that he fought for the Republicans against Franco in the Spanish Civil War – in other words, previously he has always helped the anti-Fascist cause, the side of right and justice. He also allows the band to play the Marseillaise in the brilliantly tense scene in his cafe when Laszlo initiates an impromptu sing-off against the Nazi officers who are bellowing a German nationalist song, implying sympathy for the Allied cause.

The final act of Rick’s redemption comes in the famous final scene, when, after planning to escape with Ilsa and leave Laszlo to the depredations of the Nazis (indeed, it even seems that he will betray Laszlo by helping the police arrest him), he abruptly changes his mind and lets Laszlo escape. He even takes a personal risk, forcing Renault, the chief of police, to allow Lazlo’s escape at gunpoint. He thus sacrifices his personal desires – his love for Ilsa and desire to escape from the febrile atmosphere of Casablanca – for a greater cause. His reasoning is summed up in his stirring speech in which he observes that Ilsa must leave because she is vital to Victor, “the thing that keeps him going”, and that if she does not leave she’ll regret it, “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life”. He sums it up by declaring that although he’s “no good at being noble...it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”. In other words, there is something bigger than himself, a cause worth making sacrifices for. His initial cynical posturing is shown up as a sham, a mask used to protect himself against disappointment. This underlying idealism is the second strand of the Bogart persona.

Rick’s final act of sacrifice is, I think, the fundamental point of the entire film. In its message of hope resides the film’s greatness. Its romance depends on an ending which, in a conventional sense, is ‘unhappy’, but which conveys the great moral that there is always a better and more ethical cause and course of action worth pursuing over mere self-interest. We should try to do the right thing, even when it involves sacrifice or transcending our selfish interests. This message derives all its potency in the film from Rick’s, and therefore Bogart’s, persona. It is only because Rick acts in an amoral, self-interested way to begin with that his final act of altruism seems significant and powerful – his change of heart is the film’s dramatic hinge. Without Bogart and its basically moral message, Casablanca would now be a half-remembered old film that no-one watches.

The message and functioning of the Bogart persona work in the same way in another of Bogart’s greatest pictures, To Have and Have Not, which was his first film with Lauren Bacall. The plot is similar to Casablanca. Bogart plays Harry ‘Steve’ Morgan, a jaded fisherman working in Martinique just after the fall of France in the summer of 1940. Martinique being a French colony, it is under Vichy control. The owner of the hotel in which Harry is living is a resistance sympathiser, who asks for Harry’s help in smuggling some resistance leaders to the island. At first, Harry refuses. He is interested only in running his fishing business, and will not risk helping the resistance, since he knows that if he is found out by the Vichy authorities he will end up imprisoned on Devil’s Island. When asked his sympathies by the Police Captain, he answers, “minding my own business”. Once again, he plays the apparently neutral, amoral individualist not interested in “sticking his neck out” for anyone.

However, when his money is confiscated by the Police Captain and he finds himself broke, he agrees to help the resistance in exchange for payment. In transporting the resistance fighter Paul de Bursac and his wife, Harry’s boat is attacked by a Vichy patrol vessel and de Bursac is shot and injured. They cannot get him to a doctor because the Vichy authorities are scrutinising his every move. Morgan, who has some rudimentary first aid knowledge, agrees to remove the bullet and help save de Bursac’s life. The Vichy authorities try to bribe Harry to betray the resistance members, but he refuses. Harry even overpowers the Captain of Police and forces him at gunpoint to free his alcoholic friend whom they are interrogating, as well as signing harbour passes for de Bursac.

Although Harry Morgan agrees to help at first out of financial necessity, he ends up going out of his way to assist the resistance fighters, as the Vichy authorities’ behaviour begins to offend his sense of justice. The mask of indifference and apolitical individualism once again falls to reveal a basic core of nobility. Asked by the incredulous hotel owner ‘Frenchy’ why he is helping them after his initial indifference, Harry answers, “maybe because I like you, maybe because I don’t like them”. To Have and Have Not does not have the grandeur or drama of Casablanca, but the basic message of a sense of justice trumping self-interest and neutrality emerges once again. The world-weary, hard-headed businessman has a change of heart and realises that basic human decency is something work taking risks for.

The third and last detailed example of the Bogart cynic-idealist dynamic I will explore is Key Largo, one of the fruits of the brilliant Bogart-Huston partnership. In this film Bogart plays a Second World War veteran, Major Frank McCloud, who goes to visit the father and wife of an old comrade who died while fighting with McCloud in the Italy campaign, James Temple (Lionel Barrymore) and Nora (Lauren Bacall). They run a hotel in Key Largo. When McCloud arrives, it quickly becomes apparent that the sinister individuals staying at the hotel are not, as they insist, there for a fishing trip, but are instead gangsters led by the notorious fugitive hood Johnny Rocco, played menacingly by Edward G Robinson. The gangsters are there to complete a big deal, and their identity is quickly revealed by McCloud. They drop the fishing trip pretence, and take McCloud, Temple and Nora prisoner at gunpoint.

At first, once again the Bogart character appears to be selfish and insular. When given a chance to shoot Rocco and send the gangsters packing, he refuses, affecting indifference. He pretends not to care, declaring that “one Rocco more or less isn’t worth dying for”. He is cynical about the idea that Rocco might get his comeuppance, shouting to Nora, “Rocco wants to come back to America, let him! Let him be President!” His apathetic and self-serving attitude is summed up by the typical statement that “I fight nobody’s battles but my own”, a sentiment almost identical to that of Rick in Casablanca and Harry in To Have and Have Not.

However, once again Bogie reveals his true colours and reverts back to the side of justice and decency. Rocco humiliates his alcoholic mistress and causes the murder of two innocent native Americans, which snaps McCloud out of his indifference. He had given up his old hope, for “a world in which there’s no place for Johnny Rocco”, but in the face of such cruelty he revives it, firstly by risking his life to help Rocco’s mistress and then by overpowering the gangsters when they force him to pilot their boat back to Cuba, where Rocco lives in exile. Although McCloud has, intellectually at least, given up on his idealistic hope that “we’re fighting to cleanse the world of ancient evils”, his instincts betray his apathy and he does the right thing. As Nora puts it, “your head said one way, but your whole life said another”.

As you can see, the structure of these films is basically the same. World-weary, cynical Bogie, who claims to have given up on his ideals and his belief in moral behaviour (both personally and politically) for a belief in self-reliant, self-serving amoral individualism, is given a choice; does he do the right thing at some personal risk, or act in a callous and selfish way? Does he stick out his neck, or not? Initially, he acts as his jaded persona would imply, but then he always has a change of heart, ends up abandoning his indifference, and does the right thing. Of course, not all of his film follow this structure (although many do, including The African Queen where Charlie Allnut agrees to ‘stick his neck out’ for Rose in her attempt to help the British war effort, despite his misgivings), but the Bogie persona is given its most concentrated expression in the films underpinned by this dynamic of moral redemption and sacrifice.

The appeal of these themes, which are so brilliantly symbolised by Bogart, can scarcely be seen outside of the context of the era in which the films were made. The despair and apathy that constitutes half of the Bogart persona reflects the circumstances of the 30s and 40s. Ravaged by the Great Depression and the initial successes of Fascism, the world reflected and seemed to reinforce the characteristic Bogie cynicism and abandonment of hope. In Casablanca, Rick’s hopelessness is partly a product of his experience of the defeat of the anti-Fascist cause in Ethiopia and Spain. The initial selfishness and indifference of Bogart in all of these pictures symbolises the despair and fear that engulfed the world of Bogart’s era, a world in which it seemed that all the great ideals and causes had been lost, and so personal survival was the best that could be hoped for. Bogart’s recurrent redemption, his consistent changes of heart, reflect the victory of will and hope over despair that crystallised itself in the war effort, and more specifically, in the American context, FDR’s determination to tackle the Great Depression and also enter the war on the Allies side (it is not a coincidence that Bogart was a supporter of the Democrats and campaigned for FDR).The saviour of Bogey’s soul in the films is an allegory for the saviour of the world from the terrors of Fascism and poverty. It is not difficult to see the appeal of such allegories of sacrifice and morality to audiences making their own sacrifices to win the war.

Indeed, there is a sense in which Bogie becomes a personification of the USA itself. His initial reluctance to involve himself in other people’s battles, his self-reliance, seems to me to be a metaphor for American isolationism and reluctance to get involved in the Second World War. His eventual determination to do the right thing reflects FDR’s attempts to bring the USA in the war, and even the Marshall Plan and post-war reconstruction. I may be in danger of reducing Casablanca to a series of crude national stereotypes, but the character of Rick is clearly, on one level, meant to represent America, just as Laszlo represents Occupied Europe and Major Strasser represents Nazi Germany. In Key Largo, Johnny Rocco is clearly a symbol of the thuggishness and cruelty of Nazism, and Bogart’s eventual conversion to standing up to Rocco, to making a “world in which there is no place for Johnny Rocco”, seems to me to be a metaphor for US involvement in the War. There is, of course, a sense in which this narrative is a piece of self-justifying American propaganda, because the USA only entered the war in 1941 by accident, due to Pearl Harbour and Hitler’s stupid decision to declare war.

It is not fair, however, to reduce the appeal of the Bogart persona and his greatest films to crude political allegory. The figure of Bogart the stoical, self-reliant loner, stalked by disappointment and cynicism, resonates on a far more personal level. Bogart’s characters’ selfishness and apathy is always a product of weltschmerz, of disillusionment, and such disillusion is also a product of personal disappointment that has universal appeal. Rick in Casablanca is a haunted figure not just because of the rise of Fascism and the fact that he is tired of lost political causes, but because he has a broken heart after losing Ilsa. There is a very strong indication that Harry in To Have and Have Not has suffered romantic disappointment – ‘Slim’, the love-interest played by Bacall, asks Bogart, “Who was the girl?” A baffled Bogart replies, “Who was what girl?”, to which Bacall responds, “The one who left you with such a high opinion of women”. Charlie Allnut in The African Queen is clearly a depressive loner, one who finds redemption in the arms of Katherine Hepburn. The treatment of love in the key Bogart films doesn’t always seem consistent. Sometimes romantic love itself is presented as the higher, moral end, which Bogey reaches despite his own cynicism, comparable to the higher moral or political end that Bogey always ends up on the side of, and sometimes love is sacrificed for that higher moral or political end – the former is the case in The African Queen and To Have and Have Not, the latter in Casablanca. However, the appeal of the Bogie persona on this more personal level consists, just as in the more political dimension, in the idea of the disappointed idealist reconciled, perhaps reluctantly or even ill-advisedly, but nonetheless admirably, to his original ideals. The ideal is of love and connection to another individual on the personal level, and of moral connection to the wider community via values such as decency, fairness and justice on the political level. Either way, Humphrey Bogart is the cynic as disappointed romantic par excellence. The romance, the idealism, of course, gains its power from the cynicism, the struggle against its irresistible pull. Straightforward idealism untainted by moral ambivalence and conscientious struggle is no idealism at all.

These themes are not all that is appealing about Bogart. His outsider mentality, which permeates from his real personality into his film roles, gives him a rebellious tinge. The characters he played tended to be infused with impatience with pretension and authority – Bogie plays by no rules other than his own. Since we know that Bogart was notoriously outspoken in his dealings with studios, and renowned as a bit of a firebrand, we can once again see Bogart’s fiction and reality merging into one. Furthermore, his persona cannot stand the credulous, emotionally craven or dependent. This gives his roles a sexual charge that is absolutely unmistakable, particularly as it manifests itself in another characteristic that he himself had, that is, attraction to strong –willed, feisty women. This reaches its peak in the films he made with Bacall, which simply fizzle with incredible sexual chemistry. The scenes in which Bogie and Bacall flirt, particularly the scene in The Big Sleep with the outrageous horse-racing innuendo (“A lot depends on who’s in the saddle”) and the scenes in To Have and Have Not with the cigarettes and whistling double entendre (“You just put your lips together and blow”), are probably the most erotically charged scenes in the history of cinema (the sexual aspect of Bogie is reflected in Woody Allen’s excellent picture Play it Again, Sam, in which Bogart appears as a kind of ghostly romantic mentor to Allen’s hopeless neurotic). Another compelling aspect of Bogart was the fact that one also gets the sense that he was an intelligent and interesting person beneath the acting roles. The fact that he was a very good chess-player (the chess scene in Casablanca was his idea), almost of master strength, adds to his almost never-ending layers of cool.

However, the meaning of Bogart, and the basis of his enduring importance, is undoubtedly his cynic-as-disappointed-romantic persona, which is timeless. So long as human beings pitch hope and will against disappointed ideals and disillusion, those classic films will always be tremendous works of art. Indeed, in a world marked by deep uncertainty and instability, in which all the best causes are the lost ones and a fatalism and despair comparable to the 1930s is emerging, maybe Bogart’s time is coming again. I hope so.