Film Forum

“ALL HE HAS TO DO TO DOMINATE A SCENE IS TO ENTER IT.”
– Raymond Chandler

Humphrey Bogart became “Bogie” late. Reportedly the first to say the classic line, “Tennis, anyone?” as a stage juvenile, he went on to underworld mayhem at Warner Bros.: “In my first 34 pictures I was shot in twelve, electrocuted or hanged in eight, and was a jailbird in nine. I played more scenes writhing around on the floor than I did standing up.”

Only as a fourth choice for High Sierra did he start to incarnate that immortal image: the trench-coated, cigarette-smoking cynical urban loner, with a keen eye for phonies and fidelity to a personal code. Over the years “no cult has been bigger than the Bogart one – and considering the qualities the screen Bogart exemplified, this particular cult can only be a very healthy thing”—David Shipman. “There isn’t an actor in films today with anything like his assurance, his magnetism, or his style.”—Pauline Kael.

Born and raised on the Upper West Side, Humphrey DeForest Bogart (1899–1957) began his stage career in the 1920s playing “juveniles” before making his movie debut in 1930. But it was his breakthrough role as gangster “Duke” Mantee in both the Broadway and movie versions of The Petrified Forest (1936) that established his tough guy persona.

Typecast as gangsters in Warner Bros. movies of the 1930s, often in support of stars James Cagney and George Raft, Bogart first achieved full stardom with his break-out role in Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941), soon after establishing himself as one of the screen’s greatest romantic stars opposite Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942).

Bogart tops the American Film Institute’s list of greatest male screen legends, and was ranked the #1 movie legend of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

BOGART spotlights his close collaborations with some of the era’s greatest directors, including John Huston, Michael Curtiz, Nicholas Ray, and William Wyler. In addition to Bergman, Bogie’s leading ladies include Lizabeth Scott, Gloria Grahame, Audrey Hepburn, Ida Lupino, Jennifer Jones, and wife Lauren Bacall, who first created fireworks with Bogart in To Have and Have Not (“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? Just put your lips together and blow.”).

Presented with support from the Robert Jolin Osborne Endowed Fund for American Classic Cinema of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Films in this Series