Bogart in the 30's and before - An Album

Black Legion / Archie Mayo (1937). Warner Bros. If “Black Legion” had been released any time in the past 15+ years, its tagline would surely have trumpeted “Based on a True Story!” During the 1930s, headlines screamed about a white supremacist fascist organization that took a hoods-and-robes approach like the KKK. There had been a sensational murder trial involving this group that had made the national news. This kind of story was exactly in the Warner wheelhouse of tackling dark social issues. This fictional retelling also gave their new contract player, Humphrey Bogart, a meaty lead role. Bogie plays Frank Taylor, a workman in a machine shop who is happy with his job and family (wife Erin O'Brien-Moore and young son Dickie Jones), until his expected promotion to shop foreman goes to a younger man named Dombrowski. With all his plans of a new car and fixed-up house now dashed, Taylor listens to a radio rant by a man who blames everybody’s problems on “foreigners” who are taking jobs and opportunities away from “real Americans.” Taylor is introduced to the anti-immigrant group by a co-worker (the always reliable sly villain Joe Sawyer) and quickly falls into a nightly routine of terrorizing anyone who is Jewish or Irish or notably “ethnic.” Next door neighbor/good friend Dick Foran finds out what Bogie is up to and tries to intervene, with a resulting tragedy and trial. Bogart is excellent as he takes his character through happiness, anger, desperation and, finally, remorse. Ann Sheridan has a small role as Foran’s girlfriend, but O’Brien-Moore is the main female lead, very good as Bogart’s suffering wife. A close-up of her distraught face is the final shot at the fade-out. My only carp about “Black Legion” (as well as “American History X” which might be something of a modern counterpart) is that the main character does not repent of being a part of white supremacy because of any change of mind about the minorities they hate, but because they are ultimately betrayed by their former comrades.

This is one I've always wanted to see but haven't yet caught up with. Not only for the two icons together at the dawn of their screen careers, but for one of the few feature film appearances of Claire Luce who, two years later, would costar with Fred Astaire in Gay Divorce, his final B'way show, in the role inherited by Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee (according to dance and film critic Arlene Croce, the Breen Office decreed that there was nothing gay about divorce, but it was okay for a divorcee to be).

If I recall my film lore correctly, Fredric March's role in The Desperate Hours would have been Tracy's but for those billing issues. Luv me some Freddie, but Spence and Bogie at that stage would have been something to see. 

Still you can never tell. Tracy and James Stewart both made their MGM debuts in 1935's The Murder Man (Tracy in the lead; Stewart's role a small one, and I don't specifically remember if they shared any scenes), and it was nearly fifteen years later that they finally costarred in the studio's 1949 Malaya. Might be just me, but their combo never seemed to ignite. Maybe they'd have been better together in something lighter and wittier, at which they were both expert by then. And of course, as Hepburn tells it, she had wanted Tracy for Stewart's role in The Philadelphia Story. I can see that.

See? Rambling. 

And I don't know why your text moved to its own box when I deleted the images to save space. But hey: it deserves it.

Oh, look: now it's back in the original box. Wasn't in the preview. Ah, well. 

The Petrified Forrest 1936, Duke Mantee



The 1935 Broadway production of The Petrified Forest starred Leslie Howard, an established star, and Bogart, an actor in his first leading theatrical role. Robert E. Sherwood based the Duke Mantee character on John Dillinger, the notorious criminal who in 1933 was named the FBI's first "Public Enemy #1" by J. Edgar Hoover, and in 1934 was ambushed and gunned down in spectacular fashion by FBI agents. Bogart, who won the stage role in part because of his physical resemblance to Dillinger, studied film footage of the gangster and mimicked some of his mannerisms in his portrayal.

For the film, Warner Brothers intended to cast the more bankable Edward G. Robinson as Duke; but Howard, whose contract gave him final script control, informed the studio that he would not appear in the movie version without Bogart as his co-star. The film made Bogart a star, and he remained grateful to Howard for the rest of his life. In 1952, Bogart and Lauren Bacall named their daughter Leslie Howard Bogart in honor of Howard, who had been killed in a plane crash when the German air force shot down his BOAC flight from Lisbon to Bristol during World War II.

In 1955, a live television version was performed as an installment of Producers' Showcase, a weekly dramatic anthology, featuring Bogart (now top-billed) as Mantee, Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall.

No kiddin'? Well, there ya go: you can never tell (well, I can't anyway). The one I have trouble with was Hepburn's other choice: said she originally asked for Clark Gable as Dexter. I can see him pulling off Dexter's wise-ass mischief, but not the aristocratic, to-the-manor-born gentility that Grant could.

But perhaps I underestimate Gable. He was convincing as an elegant B'way sophisticate who said "toe-mah-toe" rather than "ta-may-toe" in But Not For Me, and Grant himself had transformed from an up-from-the-streets Cockney.

Getting back on topic, Bogie's NYC origin was one of affluence and fine education (and he characterized his early theater roles as those of collegiates bounding onstage with lines like, "Tennis, anyone?"), and look how he transformed himself. 



Lord, I was born a ramblin' man.    

In the mid-'50s, Tracy seemed to pull out of - or try to - as many projects as he completed: also The High and the Mighty; Tribute To A Bad Man;* and producer Dore Schary wrote that Tracy had wanted to withdraw from Bad Bay At Black Rock, complaining, "I'll be up there sweating in the Lone Pine heat while you're here in an air-conditioned office." Schary offered, "Okay, Spence, I'll go and sweat with you," and Tracy relented.

For whatever reason, those years must have been difficult ones for Tracy.


*I've mentioned this on another thread once, but it's one of those strange and fun "six (or fewer) degrees of separation" things, and reconnects to Bogart: preparations for TTABM were halted when Robert Francis, who was to have costarred with Tracy, was killed in a plane crash only a year after his screen debut in The Caine Mutiny with Bogart. By the time production resumed, Tracy was out, James Cagney was in, and Cagney had personally selected as Francis's replacement Don Dubbins...who had made his second feature appearance in The Caine Mutiny in a scene with Francis and Bogart.