By Stuart Mitchner
At the moment, I’m thinking of Judy Garland, who was born on June 10, 1922, six months after Humphrey Bogart made his Broadway debut and Franz Kafka penned a diary entry about the “strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing — it is a leap out of murderers’ row.” Besides being the term of choice for the Ruth-Gehrig heart of the 1927 New York Yankees, murderers’ row was the way Warner Bros. execs branded their mobster batting order of Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson.
The Dark Power
My copy of Franz Kafka’s Diaries 1910-1923 (Schocken 1975) is open to January 29, 1922, in which he refers to himself as “the man with the too-great shadow” and suggests that “the real, incontestable truth” is “physical pain.” Half a year later, in a letter to Max Brod, he compares writing to the “dark power that emerges when it wills and, without bothering about my stammering, destroys my life. Of course I don’t mean by this that my life is better when I don’t write. Rather it is much worse and must end in madness. But that is true, of course, only under the condition that when I don’t write I am a writer; and a writer who doesn’t write is, to be sure, a monster asking for madness.”
Passages like these, along with the “leap out of murderer’s row” made me curious to see what Bogart was like before he became the force he had to be, as if realizing that an actor who doesn’t act, who ignores the “dark power” of his art, is comparable to Kafka’s “monster asking for madness.”
Two Can Play
One of Hollywood’s most exhilarating he-she “meet-cutes” takes place in Thornton Freedland’s long forgotten film, Love Affair (1932): He’s a pilot and air craft designer, she’s rich, spunky, and beautiful; they’ve just met; he takes her for a wild ride in his two-seat, open-cockpit biplane; after each death-defying stunt, he gleefully asks her, “Okay?” and she manages a shaky “Yes.” Back on solid ground, she gives him a wild ride in her roadster, hitting 80 mph on city streets, running red lights, and after each near miss, asks her visibly shaken passenger, “Okay?”
“He” is Humphrey Bogart, “she” is Dorothy Mackaill. In 1932 she was a star, he was just starting. While he’s perfectly suitable in the part, showing none of the stiffness that plagued leading men in the early talkies, there’s no trace in his speech of the surly, edgy, smile-when-you-say-that voice of the actor eventually voted “the greatest male screen legend” by the American Film Institute. Then, in one year, 1936, Bogart transformed himself from a man without shadows, small, civil, and social, in white shirt, pants, and shoes (in Isle of Fury), into the killer Duke Mantee (in The Petrified Forest), a tightly wound piece of work with eyes in which no light shines. According to the commentary and special features on the DVD of The Petrified Forest, when Warner Bros. wanted to use one of their top-billed tough guys like Robinson or Cagney for the part of Duke Mantee, Leslie Howard, who co-starred with Bette Davis, saved the day by refusing to make the picture unless Bogart played Mantee (as he had done opposite Howard a year before on Broadway). The DVD commentary claims that Bogart’s performance as Mantee saved his career, was the talk of the lot, and bowled over the bigshots at Warner Bros.
The Scar
Writing about Bogart in her book Lulu in Hollywood (Knopf 1982), Louise Brooks, who first met him in 1924, recalls “a slim boy with charming manners who was unusually quiet for an actor. His handsome face was made extraordinary by a most beautiful mouth. It was very full, rosy, and perfectly modeled — perfectly, that is, except that, to make it completely fascinating, at one corner of his upper lip a scarred, quilted piece hung down in a tiny scallop.” When Bogart went into films, “a surgeon sewed up the scallop, and only a small scar remained… The scar on his lip has since become a symbol of his heroism. In those early years, it was taken for granted that he got punched in the mouth at some speakeasy.” Brooks’s most important and passionately stated insight concerns Bogart’s third wife Mayo Methot, who “set fire to him” at “a time of lethargy and loneliness, when he might have gone on playing secondary gangster parts. Those passions — envy, hatred, and violence,” so essential to the Bogie character, “she brought to a boil, blowing the lid off his inhibitions forever.”
You can see what Brooks is talking about in, as she puts it, “one fascinatingly complex character, craftily directed by Nicholas Ray, in a film whose title perfectly defined Humphrey’s own isolation among people. In a Lonely Place gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the film character’s, the screenwriter’s, pride in his art, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, were shared equally by the real Bogart.”
In a Lonely Place
In the noirish 1947 novel on which the film is based, Dorothy B. Hughes uses a line from J.M. Synge’s play In the Shadow of the Glen for her epigraph: “It’s in a lonesome place you do have to be talking with someone, and looking for someone, in the evening of the day.”
The notion of “looking for someone” has sinister overtones in a novel about a serial killer who went to Princeton. In Ray’s film, Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a screenwriter with a short fuse whose reputation for brawling makes him a murder suspect. He lives in a Spanish style apartment complex that evokes the Garden of Allah, a Hollywood hang-out for actors and writers, including Scott Fitzgerald. In the novel the place is called the Virginibus Arms, and the Fitzgerald association may have had something to do with the fact that Dix Steele went to Princeton, working his way through school in a hardware store. His neighbor and lover in the book, Laurel Gray (played by Gloria Grahame in the film), likes to call him Princeton.
Bogart’s dark, driven character is riding a razor’s edge of rage and you’re along for the ride from the moment the opening credits hit the screen with him gripping the wheel glaring out at the night, images of film noir LA flashing past, and when a car pulls alongside at the first stoplight and someone says something he doesn’t like, he’s primed for a fight, an ex-soldier who’s still at war. Alone at the end, he has no hope, no love, and will never find peace. In Ray’s bleak slice of Los Angeles life, nobody’s smiling, nobody feels right, except maybe the audience savoring the rare treat of a film that has the courage of its grim convictions. Ray has said that he made the change from murderer to murder suspect because he wanted the film to be “about the violence in all of us.” The same thinking influenced his last-minute decision to modify the ending in which Dix actually does kill Laurel and is arrested even as he completes his screenplay, with the film’s last shot a close-up of the last lines: “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”
Revived by Garland
When Judy Garland sings “The Man That Got Away,” which Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin composed expressly for her film A Star Is Born, she’s giving everything she has to the song, pushing aside invisible obstacles, then beckoning to the nearest musician, as if to call him up beside her, but then pushing him away, suddenly reaching for the heavens with her right arm to sing “It’s all a crazy game!” By then her voice is everywhere and everything and “game” could stand for life, death, art, love. But you’re up there with her, you who gloomed into the theatre at 22, alone in New York after a traumatic summer. In the span of a few minutes, she’s changed the world, you’re alive again, and you feel like shouting your thanks. The film you just saw was seven years old. You’ve seen a revival. That’s what they call it, you think, you who have been revived.
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Note: Kafka’s words about the “writer who doesn’t write” are from the “Backgrounds” in my edition of Stanley Corngold’s translation of The Metamorphosis (Modern Library 2013). Last week I mistakenly described his book, Expeditions to Kafka: Selected Essays (Bloomsbury Academic 2023) as an anthology; in fact, the essays are all his, some new and others translated from the German.