Warner bros, p.15
Warner Bros, page 15
Maybe calm frightened Jack. He said no thanks, and sent Lord official release forms. But he wanted Lord “to know my brother and I have the very warmest feelings towards you and always will have.”18
Lord moved on and joined Humphrey Bogart at Santana Productions. By then, Bogie had had his fill of Jack, too. Together he and Lord made a number of films, including In a Lonely Place, the masterpiece in Robert Lord’s career and a piercing portrait of being alone in Hollywood.
But the steady routine of action and conflict was not everything. Imagine you are at the movies in 1941 waiting for Sergeant York or The Sea Wolf. Then here comes something else, seven and a half minutes of cartoon, as uninhibited a celebration of the rascal as anything Jimmy Cagney ever dared.
In some dullsville American town, lurid in early Technicolor, there lives a humble man, without kin or company. He has a brown derby hat and a speech impediment. His name is Elmer Fudd and no one knows he is there. But even Fudds think of companionship, and so in the merry month of May he takes a walk; we see his droopy shoes and legs on a sidewalk. He pauses briefly at a sign for a “Lingerie Sale”—does he feel pangs of desire?
He trudges on to Gumbiner’s Pet Store. And there in the window is a gray rabbit, priced once at $150.00, but marked down now to 99 cents.
So Fudd acquires “a pet.” It’s a rabbit, but it looks like a hare, with ears standing up as long and straight as. . . . In the window, this bunny seemed demure, but as Fudd plods home with the box under his arm, the rabbit peeps out and asks, “What you got in that box, Doc?” If only Fudd had known.
The credits of the movie introduced him as “Bugs Bunny.” At last Warner Bros had found their guy, with whiskers for a mustache. Bugs is an invader: he eats any and every vegetable he can see; he will take over Chez Fudd and make it his hotel; he is a trickster and a demon, without scruple or shame—but wordy (in seven minutes he comes on with “frankly,” “irony,” “humiliate,” “responsible,” and “cad”). And he talks to the camera! He sounds like Groucho Marx as well as Cagney.
Bugs takes over the house, like a commando requisitioning civilian property in a time of crisis—this film opens January 5, 1941 (a day before FDR’s Four Freedoms speech). He wants Fudd’s bathroom and his bed. He transforms the tranquil Fudd salon, turning on the lights, getting the music going, and leading Elmer in a frantic dance—is this the first gay scene in a Warner Bros film! And if Fudd thinks to complain, Bugs slaps him around (without a grapefruit) and cries out “This means war!” In January 1941, as the rest of the studio is getting ready to be patriotic and brave, here is a whole movie that ridicules war!
It is called Elmer’s Pet Rabbit, directed by Chuck Jones (Charles Jones in the credits), produced by Leon Schlesinger, and with the voice of Mel Blanc still working out how to play Bugs. This is my passing nod to Warners cartoons and the great men just named—add Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, and so many others to the roll of honor, heroes even if Jack wanted to close down the unit from time to time. And here it is, the mayhem of liberty, the orgy of self and unrestrained id just when Warner Bros and that wabbit Jack were putting their hand on their heart—left side chest, front, idiot, underneath the medals!—and saying, “Oh, no more gangster pictures for us. We’re at war!”19
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep—sooner or later, a man and a woman have to talk
15
Bogart
IT WAS A PRINCIPLE of stardom that actors stayed the same, film after film, decade after decade. Bugs never aged, or grew up. The process established a brand, an appearance, an attitude, made sure the public liked it, and then repeated it for as long as possible. Of course, the actors and actresses grew older, though some did anything they could manage to delay that or hide it. Nearly twenty years after he had begun, in 1949, Warners persuaded Jimmy Cagney to be a gangster again. He had mixed feelings—he was so much gentler a guy in reality. And he was older, bulkier, less cocksure. Those differences added to the pathos of his Cody Jarrett in White Heat. But Warners was clinging to the past and assuring us it was the old Jim. Decades later, Jimmy Cagney is the montage of all his bustling, dancing hoods. In 1975, Philippe Mora made a documentary like that, Brother Can You Spare a Dime?, which is the 1930s as seen in Cagney pictures.
But one star did change, and the shift meant more than just lifting Humphrey Bogart’s horizons. It was a significant alteration in the idea of what a man should be. It is also close to the heart of the Warner Brothers dream in which an outlaw might become a sultry paragon.
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born in New York City on Christmas Day, 1899, the son of a surgeon and a magazine illustrator.1 Of all the actors raised in the Warners gangster tradition, Bogart was the best born, from the most affluent family. He went to Trinity and Phillips Academy, and he was apparently headed for Yale. But he was unruly and averse to his own advantages, so he joined the navy instead as a seaman. Louise Brooks knew him as a young man, and she saw a gentleman anxious to hide his privilege beneath a rough act.2 For several generations, the movies were the natural testing ground for young men who wondered whether they were brave, afraid, or just a regular mix of those moods.
Humphrey set out to be an actor, and a young male lead in polite stage plays. But he was not beautiful or energetic and not quite relaxed; his voice had a bit of a lisp and a rasp. He got some good notices but he didn’t catch on. He tried Hollywood once sound had arrived, but again he made little impact in the years when Cagney and Robinson were thriving. It was only in 1935 that he had a personal success on Broadway in Robert Sherwood’s play The Petrified Forest. When Warners decided to film it, his costar Leslie Howard told the studio it had to retain Bogart as Duke Mantee (Warners had been thinking of Edward G. Robinson—it was usually thinking of someone else). Bogart is extravagantly nasty in that part—in truth, he’s overdone. But the film did well so Warners gave him a six-month contract as a villain-type in its diet of crime pictures.
He made more than twenty films in the next few years, on supporting-part money. There were a few worthwhile jobs: the district attorney in Marked Woman, the bigot in Black Legion. But as a rule he was a hoodlum who ended badly, who snarled and whimpered, and often took a bullet from someone like Cagney. That’s how he ended up in Angels with Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties. The actor was depressed with himself. He had two failed marriages; he drank too much; and he had a bitter, needling personality that made enemies. Some people find him interesting as the Irish groom with Bette Davis in Dark Victory—others think he’s uneasy in the role. He had married for a third time—three actresses—but this wife, Mayo Methot, was a worse drunk than he was. They fought in public. He was losing his hair. He was forty and making about $1,000 a week. Nothing was happening. Bogart was typecast as a dirty rat, but not a king rat, and he was hurt. He had no ease, and stars need to like themselves. One secret to being Jack Warner was that he knew he was a terrific guy.
W. R. Burnett, the author of Little Caesar, was still writing. In 1940, he published a new novel, High Sierra. This is how it began:
Early in the twentieth century, when Roy Earle was a happy boy on an Indiana farm, he had no idea that at thirty-seven he’d be a pardoned ex-convict driving alone through the Nevada-California desert towards an ambiguous destiny in the Far West.3
John Huston read the book and wrote straightaway to Hal Wallis: “It would be very easy for this to be made into the conventional gangster picture, which is exactly what it should not be.”4 Huston had sensed that Earle could be a tragic figure, or a tough guy with an inner life. This was an early instinct (and it was homing in on the fellow Huston hoped he was), but it was prescient. War doesn’t actually want unbridled gangsters, or unreservedly violent men. The real test on courage and self-respect is more complex—a good soldier has to seem thoughtful, reluctant, and even fatalistic. He can be an infantry private, but he needs a bit of the captain, too, the phlegmatic officer type. Huston was hired to do a script for High Sierra, and he saw Earle as a veteran weary of “conventional gangster attitudes.” This was a man who wanted to “break out” of his hoodlum existence.
Warners liked the project and saw it as ideal for Paul Muni. But Muni had fought with Huston on Juarez, and now he pulled out of doing Roy Earle. At which point, Warners fired the great actor! Maybe this was all a setup to get rid of an expensive egotist. The part then failed to win George Raft, Robinson, or Cagney. Bogart was the fallback casting, probably with encouragement from Huston. But as the picture was set up, Ida Lupino (the female lead) got bigger billing than Bogart. The studio was enthusiastic about her because of her witness-stand mad scene in They Drive by Night (in which Bogart had been second male lead to Raft).5
Earle fails in High Sierra: his hope for finding a sweetheart collapses; renewed criminal life turns out disastrous. He is shot down in the Sierra peaks. But he is a winning character. His hair is going gray. He is tired and disillusioned, but he has respect for others. The film was good enough to start a change in the public’s view of Bogart. Then allow that it helped improve his sense of himself. There he was up on screen, halfway decent, an admirable loner and with chemistry between him and the Lupino part (Mayo Methot was jealous enough to hang around the set). This was the first time on screen that Bogart had played a man who might deserve a love scene.
Just as important was his growing bond with Huston. Warners was impressed with Huston’s writing, and with the sheer presence of the man ( John would be an actor too), so they offered him a chance to direct. With characteristic nerve, Huston opted for a property the studio had already failed with twice, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Considering how many gangster films Warners had done, it’s odd that the studio had not succeeded with a type we now take for granted, the private eye, in this case Sam Spade.
Here was an even better example of the reformed tough guy: laconic, sarcastic, capable of violence, but working on the side of justice, or whatever it was that might oppose Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Mary Astor in their pursuit of the stuff dreams are made of, the Falcon. Huston’s Spade is more emphatic and cruel than Hammett’s. Huston had appreciated that needling aspect of Bogart’s personality and seen a way to use it. Nearly everyone in the picture was getting a break: it was Huston’s debut, Greenstreet’s first film, a breakthrough for Lorre, a new chance for Mary Astor, and it placed Bogart as a droll, goading ringmaster. Put it next to something like Each Dawn I Die (1939) and it seems so modern. Kissing Astor but then slapping her, bantering with Greenstreet, teasing Lorre—Spade was said to be in a tight spot, but Bogart was relaxed.
Shot fast, for less than $400,000, The Maltese Falcon opened in October 1941, and it was a big success. After a full decade, the studio began to understand what it had as a property—but Bogart was getting the message, too. Jack Warner was so excited by the result that he wondered whether Hammett could be persuaded to write a sequel with the same characters. He never did, but they have stayed in our heads. Greenstreet and Lorre would be partnered at Warners in nine films. It was an instance of the culture of supporting players rising like cream, and it was a strength of the Warner stock company.
By December 1941, people at Warners were looking at a treatment for a never-produced play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, and several were thinking it might suit the new Bogart. There was second-guessing on all the casting, but Bogart was always the favorite, even if hardly anyone noted that the actor had never done a serious love scene on film before, or even been in love. But of course America had not been in the new war before, and somehow Casablanca was going to have to marry those two large motifs. By February 1942, Hal Wallis was thinking Bogart and Ann Sheridan, as yet unaware that Ilsa had to be foreign in what was going to be a nearly screwball league-of-nations movie—all shot in Burbank.
Not the least virtue of Casablanca is that Rick likes nearly everyone: he cherishes Sam; he’s prepared to stroll off into a misty future with Louis; he respects Greenstreet’s Ferrari; he relies on Dalio’s croupier; he is happy with his team of employees. Granted his resolute isolation or neutrality and his man-of-the-world apartness, still he is a kind of tuxedo Robin Hood. Yes, he adores Ilsa and would do something crazy for her—and Bogart does show the wounds left after their broken affair. But he admires Victor, too. He may have to kill Strasser, but Rick has something like Hemingway’s respect for a dangerous lion in the veldt.
By the time Casablanca opened (November 1942), Americans were at war, dying, or separated from loved ones. So remind yourself what an adroit masquerade it was, and how far a fantasy of authority, courage, and romantic altruism catered to anxious men and women in war. Imagine that Rick might have had a mistress, living at his place, and you can see how much untidier the film would have been. But tidiness is its charm. That’s in Curtiz’s camera style, and the flawless cast, and in fate, too. The film had bizarre good fortune: it opened just as the Allies took the real city of Casablanca. Did Jack Warner sometimes wonder whether he had arranged that? He was a colonel by then.
Casablanca was the second Warners picture to win the Best Picture Oscar. Bogart was nominated as Best Actor for the first time. The picture cost just under $900,000, and it earned $3.7 million on its first release. It keeps on earning. So it’s worth stressing that Bogart did it for $2,200 a week, which was less than half the pay level of several other Warner stars. Casablanca made him—as everyone knew—but he had let the project work for the studio, and he never earned a residual check on the film.
Warners learned from the picture, including the appeal of a café where a gang of stylish outsiders mingled. Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (published in 1937) could easily be a café film—with intriguing upstairs rooms. Marcel Dalio would go from being croupier at Rick’s Café Américain to “Frenchie,” in charge of a similar place in Martinique. It was also a variation on the Casablanca motif of a detached figure joining the great cause, so Harry Morgan the private operator agrees to assist the Free French against the forces of Vichy. But that’s taking the film more gravely than it really requires. You can cite To Have and Have Not as a war film if you like, but don’t neglect its fascination with knowing how to whistle, leaning in doorways, innuendo, snide flirt, and a new kind of outrageous girl. It’s not that Howard Hawks ignored war—he had made Sergeant York and Air Force at Warners—but he was best left to his own dreams and devices. And he recognized in Bogart an appealing, dry insolence that needed only one extra—a girl who was more insolent.
Lauren Bacall (as she would become) was the most striking young Warners discovery until James Dean.6 There was something else about her that was unusual: Betty Joan Perske, born in 1924 in the Bronx, was Jewish and “panic-stricken” that her discoverer, Howard Hawks, would realize that.7 Hawks’s wife, Slim, had seen her on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and suggested the girl to her husband.8 That was playing with fire for a wife, and one neglected irony of the film is that Hawks was surely bent on seducing Bacall until she and Bogart fell in love. Bogart was still married to Mayo Methot and hounded by her jealousy. His thing with Bacall—or Slim, as the film called her—might have been heavenly for anyone who loved movie romance, but it was hellish and awkward in real life. The players must have been grateful to have their movie dialogue to fall back on, supplied by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner. And Hawks may have had his brief way with Bacall—she was under a personal service contract to him.
The film is the story of a nineteen-year-old who seems to have the experience of a mature Carole Lombard or Marlene Dietrich, and who finds herself adrift in Martinique and inclined to wonder whether Harry Morgan has a light, any interest in learning how to whistle, and an invitation to engage in crosstalk. Is she an outrageous hooker, or a hook to catch our eye and ear? Hawks made films about men and women looking at one another and sparring with words, kisses, and the larger suggestion that there was no need to abide by censorship. Bacall’s character—hardly named, but it’s Marie—is independent, tricky, and sure to answer Harry back, yet she’s utterly malleable in yielding to his dream. She’s the perfect teenage sexpot for a man more than twice her age who wants to think he’s a loner and she’s a lucky find. It’s his fantasy, as shameless as it is irresistible. It’s Lolita without a breath of guilt.
It’s also the first film considered in this book that, while made at Warners, is defiantly private or personal or the work of a director as single-minded as, say, Bonnard painting breakfast tables or his wife in the bath, no matter what else might be going on in the real world. For Hawks there is no real world, there is just the dream.9 The public discovery that this provocateuse and her tickled father were in love, and surely in sex, was one of the best gifts to publicity in Hollywood history. So Bogart had more reasons to feel happy, or even smug; that may inspire the serenity with which he walks through the picture. It’s strange now to look back on this exquisite film and realize there really was a war going on. Warner Bros made the movie and paid for it, opened it and prospered on it. But the film is above and beyond that context. It’s like a great (yet phantom) Gothic cathedral, still standing, but oblivious of the culture in which people once believed in its God. It is a masterpiece—and that’s reason to take note: while Warner Brothers was happy to make very good, entertaining films, it had not the least interest in masterpieces. For all the studio knew, there could and should have been a proviso in the Production Code against masterpieces, for if word ever got out that they were possible, the whole scam might be over.
And if you want any more insolence, just to rub it in, the team did it again, and did it even better in The Big Sleep. Some commentators reckon that the originator of that alleged story, Raymond Chandler, believed the big sleep was death. But that’s too solemn or sentimental for Hawks. The sleep is there to furnish the dream, and its rapture sweeps aside story.
