The number one movie legend of all time?

BIOGRAPHY: Tough Without a Gun: The Extraordinary Life of Humphrey BogartBy Stefan Kanfer Faber, 300pp. £14.99

IN THE LATER stages of Stefan Kanfer's efficient, readable musing on Humphrey Bogart's life and career, the author explains that, each year on his birthday, the actor would weep his way through a screening of William A Wellman's poignant A Star Is Born. Remade twice, the original 1937 version follows an aging movie star, addicted to booze and self-pity, as he copes badly with the meteoric rise of his much younger wife, also an actor. As the years progressed, according to Kanfer, Bogie identified more and more with the character played so touchingly by Frederic March. Really?

Considering Humphrey Bogart's unassailable position in the pantheon, the cine-literate reader will find the star's despair faintly absurd. True, at the point Kanfer introduces the story, Bogart had suffered a few professional setbacks; later films such as The Desperate Hoursand We're No Angelsdid not repeat the success of classics such as The Big Sleepor Casablanca. Yes, his fourth wife, the indomitable Lauren Bacall, was some 25 years his junior. But, when he passed away, in 1957 – brought down by a prodigious appetite for unfiltered Chesterfield cigarettes – just three years had passed since his Oscar-nominated turn in The Caine Mutiny.And, popular as Lauren remained, her fame never came close to eclipsing that of her craggy husband.

Death only increased his renown. Three years later, when Jean-Luc Godard gave the world Breathless,Bogart had already been installed as an unsaintly secular saint. The final photograph in Kanfer's book shows Jean-Paul Belmondo, star of Godard's new-wave classic, gazing adoringly – a pilgrim before an icon – at a still of the great man. Brando, Gable, Grant and Cooper may have fumed from the grave, but, when, in 1997, Entertainment Weeklyidentified Bogart as "the Number One Movie Legend of all time" few sensible folk could muster any serious argument.

So what was at the root of Bogart’s insecurity? Well, he wasn’t born to play the browbeaten, dog-eared outsider. Raised in a posh enclave of Manhattan, Bogart was the son of notably successful parents. His father, Dr Belmont DeForest Bogart, was a respected surgeon. His mother, Maud Humphrey, was a greatly admired watercolourist and commercial illustrator.

Schooled at the finest institutions, the young Bogart might have been expected to point himself towards the more respectable professions, but, following expulsion from Phillips Academy, Andover, he chose, instead, to enlist as an ordinary seaman in the US navy. He dabbled in film direction and screenwriting before stumbling his way towards supporting parts on Broadway. Odd as it now seems, his initial speciality (in keeping with his upbringing) was the foppish upper-class pretty boy. A persistent half-true rumour maintains that it was Bogart who first uttered the immortal line “Anyone for tennis?”

When, thus, he was cast as the ruthless gangster in The Petrified Forest,a successful chamber play by Robert E Sherwood, some observers felt he was playing against type. In retrospect we see that the role allowed Bogart to work through many elements of his later, indestructible persona. Like few other lead actors before or since, Bogart, in his key performances, perfected a character type. Sardonic, cynical, surprised by his own sandpaper charm, the Bogartian figure could only have emerged from the desperation of the Great Depression. Later rebels played by James Dean and Marlon Brando reacted against 1950s conformity; the anti-heroes of early Bogart films seemed tuned in to the prevailing sense of hopelessness.

The Petrified Forest, filmed in 1936 with Bette Davis in support, brought Bogart to Hollywood, but proper fame would have to wait a few years. Playing another, more likeable gangster, he had a big hit with Raoul Walsh's High Sierrain 1941. Later that same year, now grumpily on the other side of the law, he excelled in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon. Immortality soon followed with Casablanca.

Humphrey Bogart, born in 1899, was thus into middle age before he became a fully fledged movie star. Here, surely, was another source of his professional uncertainty. Having spent so much time on the way up, he was, throughout his glory years, conscious that failure lurked just over his shoulder.

Kanfer gently highlights the extent to which Bogart's self-declared status as a rebel was something of a pose. In 1947 the actor, a liberal throughout his life, joined the Committee for the First Amendment, a grouping of Hollywood professionals established to resist the early advances of McCarthyism. When, however, some of his colleagues began trumpeting their left-wing beliefs before the House of Representatives committee on un-American activities, Bogart withdrew and wrote an article entitled "I'm No Communist" for Photoplaymagazine.

Sympathetic observers felt he was naive for becoming involved in the first place. Other, more radical colleagues – Paul Henreid, his co-star in Casablanca,for one – never quite forgave his apparent backsliding.

No matter. More than half a century after Bogart's death, his on-screen persona remains one of the most durable constructs in popular culture. Kanfer, an experienced biographer, once film critic for Timemagazine, offers readers a neat, economical description of its evolution. The book does contain the occasional howler (the Peter Lorre film concerning child murder is M,not The Man Who Knew Too Much), but, as a primer on Bogartology, it should prove useful to future generations of students.

A closing explanation of why such a figure could never again emerge is particularly poignant. It’s a familiar chicken-and-egg riddle. Older people won’t go to the cinema because, they feel, the studios don’t make films for them. The studios won’t make films for older people because such audiences don’t go to the cinema. Good luck flogging a middle-aged, creased, weary existentialist in that climate.

Donald Clarke is The Irish Timesfilm correspondent