IN the 40 years since his death, Humphrey Bogart has never really left us. His survival is most immediately apparent in the endless and almost invariably unfunny pastiches of the Rick Blaine/Philip Marlowe/Sam Spade stereotypes spewed out by the advertising and (alleged) comedy industries. But the original characters endure with the films themselves, marking out Bogart as the actor whose greatest work transformed the role of the Hollywood tough guy.
Of the 81 films he made, six - The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and To Have Not, The Big sleep, Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo - are classics by anyone's judgment. With a little cultish licence you can add High Sierra, In a Lonely Place, Beat the Devil and The Caine Mutiny, while if you head out into the folksier mainstream you can have The African Queen as well.
Would any of them have been half as good without Bogart? Try recasting these roles with his contemporaries and even employing a judicious mixture of William Holden and Spencer Tracy you wouldn't turn up a winner. Restrict the choice to the stars who kept Bogart in almost exclusively "one note roles" until he was 40 - Raft, Robinson, Muni, even Cagney - and they look even worse.
In their almost certainly definitive biography of Bogart, Ann Sperber and Eric Lax take us through the 1930s Warner Brothers studio lot where Jack Warner forced Bogart to work his passage on duds such as China Clipper and Isle of Fury. "If anyone's going to fuck you," Warner told him after yet another Bogart walk out had been uncomfortably resolved, "let it be Warner Brothers."
The tyranny of the studio system has been treated on many previous occasions, as have the long Warner Bogart battles, which stretched far into the actor's years of superstardom, but under the microscope of Sperber's meticulous research (seven years and a quarter ton of paper by the time of her death in 1994) and Lax's careful handling of it (he never met her - the book is a collaboration of strangers) the story rises above the level of celebrity gossip.
For it was his experiences under the studio system which set Bogart up to be the new type, "a new kind of screen character - an embattled man equally at odds with public morality and himself ... a strange mix of ambiguity and integrity". Take Bogart at the beginning of the Casablanca shoot. It was his first film in a vastly improved Warner deal, yet he spent his first lunch with Ingrid Bergman wondering how they could get out of the movie: "they thought the dialogue was ridiculous and the situations were unbelievable".
SO Bogart played correspondence chess on the set while the script was finished and when you first encounter Rick Blaine in the film, the owner of this rather fabulous club, he is equally downbeat, playing chess in medium close up, "taking a drag with pursed lips, intent on his game, the overhead lighting turning the sockets of his eyes into expressionless black pools." Behind the lights Bogart's third wife, Mayo Methot, wobbled about jealously, convinced he was in love with Bergman.
The background to the last great scene of Casablanca was just as unlikely. Through the fog, a group of midgets from Central Casting queued for the cardboard cutout plane at the back of the sound stage, the perspective perfect. But they had to wait while Bogart and Michael Curtiz fought for two hours in what the production report called a "story conference" between director and star. Then the "Here's looking at you, kid" speech was filmed.
Bogart is told with a steady, unspectacular narrative that pays its dividends through the detail Sperber has gathered from production reports, FBI files, script notes and over 200 interviews. Bogart's upper middle class parents are revealed as morphine addicts who drank and fought, producing a son already deeply cynical about their pretensions. This seems more relevant than his navy medical which, we are told, found "a slight varicocele, or swelling of the spermatic veins the left side of the scrotum."
By and large, though, the authors have avoided the laundry list approach. Three pillars of Bogart's life - his drinking, his three failed marriages and his great love for Lauren Bacall - interweave almost decorously with the filmography. The other big Bogart biography to be published this year, by Jeffrey Meyers, apparently claims that Bacall enjoyed intimate relations with Frank Sinatra as Bogart lay on his deathbed. Lax simply supplies Bacall's impression that her husband was somewhat jealous of Sinatra but takes it no further.
One other episode is covered Bogart's naive but gutsy leadership of liberal Hollywood's lobbying of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and his equally naive but slightly less gutsy climbdown within weeks, under pressure from, as you might have guessed, Warners.