The Real Meaning of Humphrey Bogart

John Huston invented Bogie.

Jean-Paul Belmondo worshipping at the shrine

Before The Maltese Falcon Humphrey Bogart was a bit player—mad scientist, Irish groom, third thug. He stepped up when he played Duke Mantee, a part evoking Dillinger, in The Petrified Forest on Broadway, to Leslie Howard’s T.S. Eliot-soaked poet.

There was an audible gasp when Bogart came onstage, so persuasive was he. But for the movie Warners wanted Edward G. (Ah, producers!) Howard however said he wouldn’t do it without Bogart, who later named his daughter Leslie Howard.

But for the next five years he was still supporting cast. When George Raft, who the director fought for, turned down the part of Mad Dog Roy Earle in High Sierra, Bogart got up to bat—an ex-con, sucker for the wrong girl, dead in the shoot-out, but the lead.

Huston, about to direct his first movie, had the idea of starring gangster-face Bogart as the detective-hero. He gave hit novel The Maltese Falcon to his secretary to type up as a script, and a few days later bumped into Hal Wallis, who complimented him on it (Huston never found out how he got it), but wanted George Raft. Raft didn’t want to work with a first-time director (hah!) and turned it down.

The casting was brilliant: Peter Lorre from Murnau and German Expressionism, new at Warners; Sidney Greenstreet from Shakespeare and the English music hall, in his first film at sixty-two; deliciously feminine Mary Astor, articulate and tricky; and Bogie, toughest of tough guys, spit-in-your-eye insolent and enjoying it.

(suddenly jumps up and shouts down at the DA)

Now both you and the police have as much as accused me of being mixed up in the other night’s murders! Well, I’ve had trouble with you before, and as far as I can see my best chance of clearing myself of the trouble you’re trying to make for me is by bringing in the murderers all tied up. And the only chance I’ve got of catching them and tying them up and bringing them in is by staying as far away as possible from you and the police because you’d only gum up the works!

(to the stenographer, softer tone)

You getting this all right, son, or am I going too fast for you?

It’s a gorgeous film. (See Gorgeousness.) Dashiell Hammett, who wrote the novel (there are only two passages that aren’t in the script), was of the “hard-boiled” school, Hemingway guys, like Huston (see Hemingway for Wimps). Toughness is scarcely my pose, but this film is exquisitely made. There isn’t a shot that doesn’t give pleasure.

Nor am I pro-puritanism (on which I can be intensely boring—see Greece versus the Puritans), and Sam Spade is a portrait of the Puritan in action.

The core of the ethic—I’ve got Max Weber’s book open as I type—is “one's duty in a calling.” Spade excels as a detective, and that’s all he wants. He turns the love of his life over to the police, he tells her, because he is a detective, and when someone kills your partner you’re supposed to do something about it, or it’s bad “for all detectives, everywhere.” She laughs at this. “Don’t be silly,” he says, “you’re taking the fall.”

Like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress he trusts no one—not his woman, not his friends, not at least until he’s secured his own salvation. And the money he earns he doesn’t dare enjoy.

I remarked elsewhere that “cool” is a Protestant virtue, the Puritans riding in disciplined formation against hit-and-miss Cavaliers motivated by passion and beer. Sam keeps a distance between himself and his emotions. He pretends to get angry but it’s for show; as soon as he’s alone he laughs at the performance. And he won’t protect the woman he loves “because all of me wants to.”

Then he adds up the reasons. “Maybe some of them are unimportant, I won’t argue about that, but look at the number of them.” Double-entry book-keeping. “And what have we got on the other side? That maybe you love me, and maybe I love you.” We’re in the red. God wants us to show a profit—that’s how we know we’re OK with Him.

Here we have the drama of the lonely puritan Making A Decision. We others go where life leads us. Honey, you killed him, you could kill me, good-bye—is that a choice? There are other fragile beauties who like to whimper while they’re being had—they need me too. Nothing to think about, really.

The Puritan, then (and this is our largest conclusion), is a Romantic—“an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper,” Joyce called it. There are no accidents here, no grace. Nothing is as admirable as luck, I like to think, but Sam doesn’t rely on luck. He despises this world of shame and compromise, and plucks up his skirts from it.

But then Sam is Something, not Nothing, like, for example, me.

Weber contrasts the end of the Divine Comedy, Dante standing “speechless in his passive contemplation of the secrets of God” (which reminds me of Lear to Cordelia, “And take upon us the mystery of things”), with the end of Paradise Lost: “The world was all before them”. Life is a task. Time to get to work.

And this above all: Thou shalt not be a fool. “I won’t play the sap for you!” His partner was a fool, and look what happened to him. It's a cautionary tale. Makes one fear for one’s own salvation.

The fake falcon he calls “the stuff that dreams are made of,” and these are the final words. You mean that’s it? For dreams, I mean? Very noir, very noir. “Kind of belief system," says Toby, "you pick up in a cold climate.”

In Casablanca, another one turned down by George Raft, Rick does play the sap, but only till he wises up and joins the war effort. This movie was made to explain to Americans why they were fighting in Europe. Rick is America—an isolationist, “I stick my neck out for nobody,” and in all things, even in love, a businessman (“A frank for your thoughts.” “In America they’d bring only a penny.”), but when he sells his bar and Signor Ferrari wants Sam thrown in he says, “I don’t buy or sell human beings”—the issue that brought about, to use Griffith’s phrase, the birth of a nation.

He's a wonderfully tough guy: “Can you imagine us in London?” “When you get there, ask me.” “How about New York?” “Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade.” Can you hear the cheers?

And wonderfully insolent. “You despise me, don’t you?” “If I gave you any thought I probably would.”

And wonderfully smart-ass. “What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?” “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “What waters? We're in the desert.” “I was misinformed.”

The other men too have allegorical (which is to say one-to-one) meanings: the Gestapo major, the Czech underground leader, the Russian bartender, Vichy France as a discarded water bottle. Straight messages, like the old refugees on their way to America: “We speak only English now. Sweetness, what watch?” “Ten watch.” “Such watch!” Take care of these people.

The women on the other hand (are you listening girls?) are symbols, self-contradictory, bearing richer ranges of meaning. Yvonne may love Rick and flirt with the Russian and sleep with the German, but she’ll lead the Marseillaise passionately enough to get the bar closed.

Casablanca is patterned on the equally superb Algiers, jewel thief Boyer hiding out in the Casbah. In walks bad-girls-go-everywhere un-not-lookable-at Hedy Lamarr with her rich protector. Boyer goes right up and asks her to dance, eyeing not her breasts but her jewels. “What did you do before you had these?” “I wanted them.”

With Casablanca Bogie entered mythology—tugging his ear, drawing his thumb across his lip, jerking it back from his teeth, staring down anyone who dared hold his gaze. Howard Hawks said, “I’m going to pair you with someone as insolent as you are.” Enter nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Bogie and Baby. She catches him pausing before he drops a passed-out woman on a bed: “Tryna guess her weight?”

Huston, though, having invented Bogie, dropped the figure—The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen (Bogart hated Africa) are not Bogie movies—until Beat the Devil, which Bogart didn’t want to do because he knew it was mocking the myth. Script by Truman Capote. Jennifer Jones: “Harry, we must beware of these men. They are desperate characters.” “What makes you say that?” “Not one of them looked at my legs!”

In private Bogie was the same kind of guy. “No actor who ever played Hamlet,” he advised young Richard Burton, “died rich.” And he is said to have complained to Bacall that he wanted to live within his means. “Anyone who lives within their means,” said Uncle Oscar, “suffers from a lack of imagination.” When the IRS asked George Raft, who came from the other tradition, how he spent ten million dollars he said, “Part of it went for gambling, part for horses, part for women. The rest I wasted.”

Bogie’s final film paired Rod Steiger with him. “Never do an eating scene with a Method actor,” he said, “they spit all over you.”

The hard-boiled style (and Raft had a Mafia background) owes itself to Hemingway, whom I think so highly of—but have to defend myself against. Perhaps the final word, at least as far as my delicate psyche is concerned, is from Charles Bukowski, a tough guy himself. “Hemingway never danced,” he said. It was all struggle, all facing the bull.

I suspect my preoccupation with Puritanism comes from living in Greece. Around here Nordics are referred to as kriokoloi, cold-asses—passionless, never showing emotion. Cold-asses think culture is impossible unless you’re rich. They think wealth is having lots and lots of money (what the French call an embarrassment of riches). Class, baby.

To make money, of course, you need brains. To spend money you need culture. I have no brains at all, but I’m crawling with culture.

This isn't, however, to take sides. I’m between these things. Not that life is ambiguous—we are incapable of sustaining ambiguity. As Wittgenstein said, you can see the duck, you can see the rabbit, but you can’t see both at once.

And since we started with Eliot, let’s hear him on it: “The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.”

Sometimes this, sometimes that. My opinions sneer at one another.

So let me reveal the sentimentalist I in some phases am, and confess that my favorite rendition of As Time Goes By is by master jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli (and don’t miss the piano solo), right here.

Germans

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”—Otto von Bismarck

The Germans.  Always a problem.

Under the Celts, Europe was one country.  Under the Romans, under the Church, under Napoleon, under Hitler, Europe was one country.  And now, under Merkel, Europe is, for the moment, one country.

When the Celts had it, it stretched from Ireland to what is now Turkey, and it’s still basically Celtic.  The Germans—Angles, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Goths, etc.—later settled on the Celts as ruling classes, and gene-testing is revealing that the “English,” for example, are mostly Celts, as the "French" have always believed themselves.   This is in addition to the pockets of more or less “pure” Celts that survive in the British Isles, Brittany, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and Venice, which is not an exhaustive list.

The Romans brought North Africa and the Middle East into the mix, as later did Napoleon and Hitler.  But the Romans excluded Ireland, the Picts—and Germany.  Stay on your side of the Rhine, they told the Germans, and when they raided into Gaul the Romans retaliated by raiding into Germania (with a hard “G”), which was as far as the Romans cared, or dared, to go.

Attila

The Germans were never Romanized.  That’s why they’re like that.  And when they (or rather we—see My Racial Profile) got the upper hand, it all fell apart.

Charlemagne almost put it back together, and he did push into Germania.  But to be legitimate he had to be crowned in Rome by Pope Leo, who used him like a rook on a chess board, and influenced politics from Britain to Constantinople.  That's where the power lay, and where it stayed: seven centuries later Vasari tells us that Michelangelo “spoke to the Pope as the King of France would not have dared to speak to the Pope.”

Germania became a collection of principalities, and it is remarkable, to me at least, that this brilliant people produced no literary masterpiece for so much of the modern period.  Martin Luther was a model of German prose (“Sin bravely,” he said; I have that on a T-shirt), but he died in 1546, and until Goethe nothing literary happened, at least nothing exportable.  There had been Winckelmann, but Goethe had to tell me about Winckelmann; I’d never have known. 

Meanwhile, of course, they were writing the world’s music, if I may take the liberty of including Austria in Germania, as Charlemagne did.  Austria had been Romanized; maybe that explains something.

They are a wonderfully clean people, Germans.  In Duck You Sucker, Sergio Leone introduces a German military advisor in Mexico by showing him in his seat on a train brushing his teeth.  Exactly.  In bed with a German you can, and do, go anywhere; in bed with a French or a British person you must proceed with caution.

They do not, however, queue up.  If you’re in line for the ski lift and one or more Germans come down the slope they’ll butt right in at the front and have to shouted at and waved away.  When, in Casablanca, Carl tells Rick that he gave the Germans the best table, “knowing they would take it anyway,” he’s not making rah-rah war talk, he's referring to this tendency of theirs to arrogate.

Here’s a better example: when the Nazis were advancing on Paris Clare Boothe Luce was staying at the Ritz, and as they approached, the hotel emptied out.  But she, intrepid reporter (she invented Life magazine), stayed on till she was the last one, and the concierge came up and told her to leave: “The Germans are coming!” he said.  She got out her notepad: “How do you know?”  “They have reservations!”

Ah, but now it gets heavy.  Now we must touch The Subject.  When I was a film professor a German colleague said, “Do you think the world will ever forgive the Germans?”

I didn’t have to ask for what.  I treated this as thinking out loud, and ignored it.  When he persisted I said, “No,” as curtly as I could. 

“Why not?”  

“For four reasons,” I said, trying to scare him off.

Didn’t work.  He wanted to suffer.  “What's the first?”

“Morality,” I said.  “So vague.  What we did to the Indians, what we did to Dresden, what we did to the Italian villages we bombed—Churchill said if we lose this war they’ll try us for war crimes.  But there was a case for it.  You could argue for it.  You could discuss it.  The truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that we were experimenting to see what the effects would be on human flesh.  Harry Truman said we did it to shorten the war and save lives, but we could have done that by blowing up Mount Fujiyama or giving them a show in Tokyo Bay.  Still, there was a case for it.  You could argue for it.  But with the camps you gave us clarity, a relief from the ambiguity we waffle around in, something black and white.  We're not likely to let that go.”

I trusted that would suffice.  But no.  “What’s the second reason?” he said.

“It was a terrible thing you did,” I shrugged.  “Why should we forgive you?”  (“You,” notice.  I knew he was standing in for his people.)

He nodded.  “The third?”

“You’ll never forgive yourselves.  Why should we forgive you?”

On the surface he was digesting all this.  “And the fourth?”

“Well, when you say the world, you don’t mean Asia or Africa.  They’re not interested—they’ve got their own histories.  You mean us—the Germanic peoples, including the blond Visigothic aristocracies lording it over the Indians in “Latin” America.  We’re Germans.  You embarrassed the family.  And in family life there’s no forgiving or forgetting.”

Now he was depressed.  I felt bad.  “On the other hand,” I said, “one of the great achievements of humankind was landing on the moon, and that was accomplished by a former SS man.”

Another German friend (I know a lot of Germans; they’re going to love this piece) is a painter, an Expressionist.  (Most German artists are Expressionists; it has something to do with horror.)  He was middle-aged before he went to his father and said, “How could you do that?”  I don’t know what the answer was.  Maybe there was none.  Maybe it was unrepeatable.  What could it be?  But the sense of a curse lingers, on the people and on the land.

And Angela Merkel works under that curse.  When France and Germany conceived the Euro-dream in 1951 it was to make sure Germany wouldn’t attack France again.  Simple as that.  The aim of the Union is to put an end to war in Europe, which a glance at history will show is continual here.  Simple as that.  But once again, Germany dominates. 

The trouble is, Europeans can’t do anything.  It's endemic.  British incompetence is as monumental as it is dignified, from the top down.  A Canadian woman who transferred to the London branch of her company confessed to me, “You just want to push them!”

A Frenchwoman, lounging topless by the Greek sea, said to me, “You Americans [for her I was willing to be an American], you act [inviting me, as it were, to action]; we French are dreamers.”  Quite right.  Don’t ever try to get anything done in France. 

When Portugal and Spain and France and England were young barbaric countries they conquered empires.  Those war lords Ferdinand and Isabella were burning down university towns in the suave Muslim civilization of the time, even as they were sending Columbus off to augment their holdings.  But that was then.  These days it takes a Napoleon or a Hitler to actually do something, and of course the results aren’t always ideal. 

A friend of mine—actually he’s not a friend of mine, I’m not even speaking to the son-of-a-bitch—anyway, he’s a yacht skipper.  You rent your yacht for a vacation and he brings the crew and sails it where you want to go, and when you’re out there and something goes wrong, he fixes it with tape and a coat hanger and gets on with it.  But the German clients are standing there with the manual in their hands.  “Yah, but zis iss not za right vay!  Ziss is not—”  They’re by-the-book people, Germans, and they’re trying to force their considerable will on the anarchic non-work-ethic Greeks.  The Greeks have never heard of the book.  (See Greece versus the Puritans.)

One of the problems with Merkel—one, I say, of the problems with Merkel— is that she grew up in East Germany, resisting Soviet thoughts, yes yes, I know, but the eastward look was her horizon.  The Euro-dream is a West-German dream, not a Merkel dream.  She has not explained to her voters that if they break the Mediterranean countries there’ll be no market for what they make, and the Greeks, as a matter of patriotism, are already refusing to buy anything made in Germany.  Nor has she mentioned that if they don’t pump their precious money into those countries their own euros won’t be worth much anymore.

M'ma!

The Greeks suspect the Germans, who, it must be conceded, rarely do anything without a plan, of forcing them to privatize their companies and sell them cheap so Germans can buy them; and to cut salaries so the new owners will have a low-rate labor force.

And the Greeks, rather than ruin themselves at German command, are playing for time—one of the things they do best.  “Wait,” they love to say.  “I don’t want to wait,” shouts the Nordic, and the German in me sympathizes.   “Wait,” they say. 

Now they will lean their chins in their hands and watch the German economy crumble.  Then we’ll see where we are.