biography

The commercial failure of the film, which was considered too literary at the time, led Bogart to return to more conventional roles in films of less interest: in Curtiz's We're No Angels (1955) he was a comic convict in company with Aldo Ray and Peter Ustinov; in Dmytryk's The Left Hand of God (1955) a sham priest taking refuge in a Chinese missionhouse to escape the tyrannical war lord whose adviser he has been. In William Wyler's The Desperate Hours (1955), already ravaged by the illness of which he was to die, Bogart played his last gangster role.

the long goodbye

In 1956 Mark Robson's The Harder They Fall cast him once more as a journalist, this time denouncing the boxing racket. Similar in mood to Deadline USA, it ended his career, if not in glory, then on a high note.

Bogart's relatively slow start was rapidly compensated for by the depth and variety of his roles from 1941 onwards. If the war years stand out by virtue of The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and To Have and To Have Not, after the war he was much freer in his choice of roles and was equally brilliant in socio-political films, thrillers and comedies. His last films reveal an actor totally identifying with his roles, enriching them with his own maturity, his unique capacity for understatement and irony.

Humphrey Bogart died of cancer on January 14, 1957. During the sixties his reputation never ceased to grow until it reached cult proportion. Indeed, at this point in time, nearly 50 years after his death, his iconic status seems only to be enhanced with each year that passes.

He possessed elegance, courage and insolence, and knew how to efface himself when necessary. Aggressive, precise, economical, his acting was astonishingly modern. Bogart remains today linked with the best that America has had to offer.

1956 The Harder They-FalI.