I just wrote a term paper for a Film & Literature course that made me think about what makes a star a star. For every hundred self-invented, brand-promoted celebrities like Lady Gaga, there’s the rare and authentic star who just is. People like Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Meryl Streep, and Paul Newman. People who wow you with something beyond their natural talent: they wow you with their simple presence. Even if the movie they’re in isn’t so great, or the powerful voice is past its prime, they still move you in a special way. The film I wrote my paper on is The Maltese Falcon and the star I’m referring to is Humphrey Bogart.
Bogie was not a handsome man. He wasn’t tall or muscular, and his smile revealed his parents’ disinterest in orthodontia. There were certainly actors of his time with more range and ambition and classical training. But there were few who so indelibly stamped a role as their own and did it over and over and over, each time differently. Released in 1941, The Maltese Falcon offered Bogart the role that would begin his legend, that of private investigator Sam Spade. And in so doing, he created an entirely new species: the film noir detective.
When Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon in 1929, he created a new type of protagonist, a crime fighter so conflicted in his personal moral code that he could pass at times for a criminal. It was a perfect fit for a film genre that would reflect the contradictions of a postwar society, the breeding ground of suspicion and disillusion that would carry America through the Cold War era up to today. Hammett wrote Spade as a hard-boiled realist who made up his own rules and then made them count. An existentialist for uncertain times.
When novice director John Huston contracted to make the film version, he wisely transferred the brilliantly sharp dialogue verbatim from the book. And he just as wisely chose an unlikely actor to portray the new hero as anti-hero. Humphrey Bogart’s name, face, and mannerisms have become synonymous with the last line of the movie, the bittersweet statement that describes what the falcon itself is really all about: “The stuff that dreams are made of.” Shakespeare wrote it for The Tempest, but it belongs to Bogie.
Bogart was 42 when he played Sam Spade. He’d had mostly gangster roles before that, primarily in entertaining, but grade-B movies. It would be his turn as Spade that would cement his trademark film persona, that of the cynic with the hard shell who ultimately shows his noble side. When he stepped into the role of bitter American expatriate Rick Blaine in Casablanca the following year, it could have foreshadowed a typecasting from which he would never escape. Instead, Bogart squeezed a totally different passion out of what would become one of cinema’s most enduring and involving love stories. Followed by Dark Passage, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, and his riveting portrayal of the psychologically disintegrating Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, there is little else that needs to be said.
Except maybe, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
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