Humphrey Bogart Movies

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the greatest masterpiece film ever made. It was ranked No. 30 on the list of 100 all-time greatest American films, according to the American Film Institute. Ironically, it was a failure at the time it was released to the box-office in 1948. Perhaps the reason for this is that viewers did not appreciate Humphrey Bogart playing a role that intentionally lacked appeal but through time, it was proven that this is one of Bogart’s best performances. It is after all an advanced character study and a voyage revolving around ageless themes of moral corruption and greed. Adapted from the novel of the enigmatic writer B. Traven and directed by John Huston, the film transformed into a classic treatment of chance and vainness in the obsolescent pursuit of affluence.  The story unfolds with Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart), a Mexican worker who was inspired to risk what little earnings he had to lead a journey to the Sierra Madre Mountains with hopes of finding gold. Accompanying him is an old prospector played by Walter Huston the director’s father, and an eager young partner. However, when they did find what they were looking for, the film becomes an attentive study of deplorable human behavior. Bogart is powerfully mad as his character grew more violent and paranoid. On the contrary, Huston brings the believable act of an experienced miner who has witnessed how gold transforms men to monsters.

From the films exciting opening scenes which features a young Robert Blake selling lottery tickets as a boy, to its concluding picture of momentous irony The Treasure of the Sierra Madre imprints a very memorable story of truth and tragedy into viewers minds. With specific scenes etched into cultural consciousness (who can forget the Mexican bandit who snarls “I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!”) and much deserved Oscar awards for both father and son (John and Walter Huston) this movie is one of the classics that can still throw a good punch.

–Jeff Shannon

Dark Passage is a doohickey movie starring Humphrey Bogart who plays as an escaped convict that tries to avoid the authorities by undergoing plastic surgery and hiding in the home of a young woman (Lauren Bacall). To prove that he is innocent, Bogart had to recuperate while in hiding and simultaneously build up his plans. Although the movie is shot completely from the subjective point of view of Bogart’s bandaged face, you might find sufficient reasons to stay and watch until the end of the movie based on the characters’ acting prowess. Directed by Delmer Daves (A Summer Place), Dark Passage tests your endurance as a viewer with a noticeable and apparent ploy. This film is considered to be at the end of a long Bogart-Bacall list of movies including To Have and Have Not, Key Largo, and The Big Sleep.

. –Tom Keogh

Humphrey Bogart plays the role of a GI paratrooper stuck in a deceitful city dominated by all kinds of crooks in Dead Reckoning. The movie is set in a world post World War II with Bogart hot on the trail of a friend who is AWOL. He then meets the dubious Elizabeth Scott, an alluring femme who may be fatal. The B roster consisting of Marvin Miller (a nightclub owner’s personal thug) and Morris Carnovsky (a fastidious, gambling nightclub owner) is dominated by Bogie’s performance of a well-reserved and seasoned war veteran. The film’s plot closely resembles other elements of Bogie classics such as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep buy recast on a low budget. While Scott is definitely no Lauren Bacall, her excellent performance is appropriately equivocal with the film’s skeptical edge, brutal anxiety, and sullied perspective of small-time crooks filled with big dreams.  This further led to put on a darker shade to Hollywood’s post-war vibe.

–Sean Axmaker

The undeniable chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall has always been loved by viewers. Although the pair made history in the screen more than once, they were loved and famous the most in this adaptation of the novel by Raymond Chandler. Directed by Howard Hawks (To Have and Have Not)  in 1946, The Big Sleep features Bogart as a freelance spy named Philip Marlowe, hired by an affluent socialite (Bacall) to keep an eye on the bothersome situations that her wild younger sister (Martha Vickers) left in her wake. The film is alarmingly great despite a really complicated plot that even Chandler had difficulty following.  With the help of William Faulkner who was responsible for the screenplay, it offers a uniquely thrilling plunge into the authenticity of what detective-fiction is all about. –Tom Keogh

To Have and Have Not is a movie where you can really attest that Humphrey Bogart fell in love with Lauren Bacall. While the film is considered to be just Howard Hawks’s version of Casablanca, To Have and Have Not is believed to have been adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s self-declared worst novel. Rumors circulated regarding Hawks challenging Hemingway on turning his worst writing into a movie and Hemingway turning the rights over thereafter. With the script adeptly written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, the film was actually one of the most fascinating works done by Bogart and Hawks. Bogart plays a boat captain who was reluctant to help the French Resistance but did so while trying to get the affection of Bacall who plays a chanteuse. Although the film’s mood is already magnificent, Hoagy Carmichael’s music takes it further.

–Tom Keogh

Of the several movies that Hollywood made about conflict in the desert on World War II, Sahara and Five Graves to Cairo are remakes of movies that were set somewhere else. John Howard Lawson, who would be blacklisted later, incidentally, derived his storyline from a Russian prewar movie about a patrol of soldiers beleaguered by Asian bandits. This situation came to be one of the most interesting plots of its time because it lent itself readily to a wartime analogy.

Humphrey Bogart stars as a commander of a U.S. tank crew who are detached from the main body of the army. They journey through the desert, growing in number along the way by picking up stragglers; some of whom are Montgomery’s tommies (with Lloyd Bridge, among others) and a tall African (Rex Ingram) with his garrulous Italian prisoner (Oscar-nominee J. Carrol Naish) who cannot wait to tell his new comrades about his relatives in “Peets-a-bourg Pennsylvania.” They reach a ruin that was once an oasis and there they are beset by a small contingent of Germans who think that there is still water to be claimed there. The deadlock between the bilingual democrats and the Nazis is a great example of suspense.

This Columbia production is for Bogart a rare break from Warner Brothers, where he always perceived himself to be embattled. He must have been very pleased, as his portrayal of Sgt. Joe Gunn is one of the kindest and most earnest performances the actor ever showed us. This is a great movie.

. –Richard T. Jameson

The movie Casablanca is considered by many as a perfect film. Since its release in 1942, it has continued to wow audiences up to this present date. The one of a kind love triangle amidst dreadfully high stakes during the war against a monster provides an erudite approach to the usual outlandish at the same time deceptive instead of garish. Humphrey Bogart plays the suspected apolitical owner of a club located in a so called “unoccupied” French territory that is nevertheless dominated by Nazis; Paul Heinreid is the gallant husband of Ingrid Bergman, Bogart’s lover who strangely left him in Paris. Casablanca features perhaps the best supporting cast throughout Hollywood film history. Sydney Greenstreet, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, and Claude Rains constitute the supporting cast. Ultimately, this is among the most appeasing and spirited films ever made.

–Tom Keogh

The Maltese Falcon remains to be one of the sharpest and most contemptuous deathless classics from Hollywood, bracingly stalwart even by post-Tarantino standards. Humphrey Bogart is Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s private detective who’s having difficulty keeping his cool as he discovers double-crosses left and right. The Maltese Falcon revolves around the stolen statue from the Middle East of the same name. The plot may be too bizarre to follow but it doesn’t even make a difference. Hammett’s dialogue on the other hand is delivered with astonishing speed and burlesque ferocity, as Bogie confronts Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, averts the deceitful advances of Mary Astor, and destroys a cowardly “gunsel” portrayed by Elisha Cook Jr. By implication, it is an action movie of all sorts. All the characters seem to be always on the verge of resorting to violence. Although, Director John Huston and Humphrey Bogart themselves both consider The Maltese Falcon as their turning point movie in accordance to their careers. Huston (The African Queen) made his debut as a director in 1941 through this movie and Bogart, who got the role with luck since George Raft declined the offer, built his influential and style-changing antihero persona.

. –David Chute

High Sierra id a 1941 melodrama that is remembered both for its powerful performances and their implications on the evolution of the past decade’s crime dramas into film noir. Directed by veteran direction Raoul Walsh and handwritten by the famed John Huston, this incident is no accident. W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar), the original writer of the novel in which the film was based also teamed up with the two. Humphrey Bogart’s role as the main character Roy “Mad Dog” Earle, John Dillinger’s invisible friend, He finds an identifying role that assumes the underlying moral uncertainty of meaning and capital fatalism can be seen in the roles soon to follow, including Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon, Huston’s debut as a director.

Among all the other gangster melodramas that feature Bogart as a crazed sociopath, his characterization of Earle in High Sierra comes in a little differently. Upon having been pardoned after a long time in prison, the tired robber is certainly focused on cherishing his freedom than go back to action immediately. Little did he know that his release was engineered and planned by a mobster who has only one goal: Make Earle his own henchman and instruct him to make risky burglary. This paved way to the development of a plot that is a prototype for doomed-heist capers- a viable subgenre that would later consist of Huston’s Asphalt Jungle and The Killing by Stanley Kubrick.

However, High Sierra’s success as a film does not lie in the plot itself but with Earle’s companion who is a brash young man the confederates selected to aid him and the tough-looking yet vulnerable taxi dancer named (Ida Lupino) they are competing for. Joan Leslie was then a starlet and played the role of another young woman complicating Lupino’s attraction to Earle in the film. But the film can be said to have soared into its nail-biting moment when the wound Earle, pursued by authorities, continued to flee higher towards the mountains and his conclusive suicidal performance would later become a cliché of sorts in lesser films, but in High Sierra it gives a compelling finish closed by Lupino’s brilliant final scene.

–Sam Sutherland

Crime School’s main protagonists consist of Leo Gorcey (Dead End) Huntz Hall, and Billy Halop. All three play the role of Frankie, Goofy, Squirt, and Spike who were thrown to a reform school after being brought out of the slum streets. Inside, the group of friends will be changed forever. They would be forcefully hardened into criminals without help from a defender. Humphrey Bogart plays a headstrong champion for the boys. With Humphreys influence on children of the slums as Baby Face Martin in Dead End a year ago, this movie is deemed to be a social-conscience movie. Crime School’s lead characters will soon find themselves in a string of Warner Bros. movies including Angels with Dirty Faces, and Hell’s Kitchen, the soon after remake of the film.