Here’s looking at you

New portrait of Humphrey Bogart sheds little new light on the iconic king of noir

January 30, 2011|Saul Austerlitz, Globe Correspondent

In April 1957, shortly before finals began at Harvard, the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge screened the Best Picture winner of 1943, “Casablanca.’’ Crowds of students came back again and again, clad in trench coats, cigarettes dangling from their lips, gleefully shouting out the memorable lines from the screenplay by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein, and Howard Koch. Too young to see it on its first turn through theaters, these young men and women had found a film that spoke to their romanticism, their bruised idealism, and their sense of Hollywood’s already-vanishing glamour. In short, they had discovered Humphrey Bogart.

Bogart was already dead by then, struck down at 57 in January of that year by cancer of the esophagus. But the Bogart cult had only just begun, soon to spread to college campuses around the nation. It would spawn such disparate tributes to his enduring appeal as Jean-Paul Belmondo’s smearing his lip with his thumb, Bogart-style, in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,’’ and Woody Allen’s comic salute to Bogie, “Play It Again, Sam.’’ Bogart has been the subject of posthumous, passionate movie love in a way in which, say, Gregory Peck has not — making the prospect of a new biography a welcome affair.

Bogart was the unlikeliest of movie stars. Short and scrawny, his upper lip marked with a scar, betraying a slight lisp when he spoke, Bogart was hardly a romantic idol like Cary Grant. A doctor’s son who grew up on Manhattan’s elegant Riverside Drive and attended the elite Trinity and Phillips Academy prep schools, Bogart was bound for Yale — his father’s medical school alma mater — before being sidetracked by a recurring taste for juvenile antics and the stage. Stefan Kanfer tells us in his new Bogart biography, “Tough Without a Gun,’’ that Bogart was initially typecast as “the eternal upper-class twit,’’ coasting along in a series of undistinguished roles until being cast as a gangster in Robert Sherwood’s play “The Petrified Forest.’’ “As Duke Mantee, everything about him was different. His diction, his gait, his attitude, his prison pallor all spoke of a life outside the law.’’ A new career as a gun-toting villain was born.