page_title: Humphrey Bogart
section_title: Supporting gangster and villain roles
hierarchical_section_title: Humphrey Bogart / Acting / Supporting gangster and villain roles
caption_attribution_description: English: Publicity still of Mayo Methot and Humphrey Bogart with their three dogs
context_page_description: Humphrey DeForest Bogart was an American film and stage actor. His performances in Classical Hollywood cinema films made him an American cultural icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Bogart as the greatest male star of classic American cinema.
  Bogart began acting in Broadway shows, beginning his career in motion pictures with Up the River for Fox. Bogart appeared in supporting roles for the next decade, sometimes portraying gangsters. Bogart was praised for his work as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, but remained secondary to other actors Warner Bros. cast in lead roles.
  His breakthrough from supporting roles to stardom came with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, considered one of the first great noir films. Bogart's private detectives, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe, became the models for detectives in other noir films. His most significant romantic lead role was with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, which earned him his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
context_section_description: Despite his success in The Petrified Forest (an "A movie"), Bogart signed a tepid 26-week contract at $550 per week and was typecast as a gangster in a series of B movie crime dramas. Although he was proud of his success, the fact that it derived from gangster roles weighed on him: "I can't get in a mild discussion without turning it into an argument. There must be something in my tone of voice, or this arrogant face—something that antagonizes everybody. Nobody likes me on sight. I suppose that's why I'm cast as the heavy."
  In spite of his success, Warner Bros. had no interest in raising Bogart's profile. His roles were repetitive and physically demanding; studios were not yet air-conditioned, and his tightly-scheduled job at Warners was anything but the indolent and "peachy" actor's life he hoped for. Although Bogart disliked the roles chosen for him, he worked steadily. "In the first 34 pictures" for Warner's, he told George Frazier, "I was shot in 12, electrocuted or hanged in 8, and was a jailbird in 9". He averaged a film every two months between 1936 and 1940, sometimes working on two films at the same time. Bogart used these years to begin developing his film persona: a wounded, stoical, cynical, charming, vulnerable, self-mocking loner with a code of honor.
  Amenities at Warners were few, compared to the prestigious Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Bogart thought that the Warners wardrobe department was cheap, and often wore his own suits in his films; he used his dog, Zero, to play Pard (his character's dog) in High Sierra. His disputes with Warner Bros. over roles and money were similar to those waged by the studio with other, less-malleable stars such as Bette Davis and James Cagney.
  Leading men at Warner Bros. included James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Most of the studio's better scripts went to them (or others), leaving Bogart with what was left: films like San Quentin (1937), Racket Busters (1938), and You Can't Get Away with Murder (1939). His only substantial role during this period was in Dead End (1937, on loan to Samuel Goldwyn), as a gangster modeled after Baby Face Nelson.
  Bogart played violent roles so often that in Nevil Shute's 1939 novel, What Happened to the Corbetts, the protagonist replies "I've seen Humphrey Bogart with one often enough" when asked if he knows how to operate an automatic weapon. Although he played a variety of supporting roles in films such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Bogart's roles were either rivals of characters played by Cagney and Robinson or a secondary member of their gang. In Black Legion (1937), a movie Graham Greene described as "intelligent and exciting, if rather earnest", he played a good man who was caught up with (and destroyed by) a racist organization,
  The studio cast Bogart as a wrestling promoter in Swing Your Lady (1938), a "hillbilly musical" which he reportedly considered his worst film performance. He played a rejuvenated, formerly-dead scientist in The Return of Doctor X (1939), his only horror film: "If it'd been Jack Warner's blood ... I wouldn't have minded so much. The trouble was they were drinking mine and I was making this stinking movie." His wife, Mary, had a stage hit in A Touch of Brimstone and refused to abandon her Broadway career for Hollywood. After the play closed, Mary relented; she insisted on continuing her career, however, and they divorced in 1937.
  Bogart entered a turbulent third marriage to actress Mayo Methot, a lively, friendly woman when sober but paranoid and aggressive when drunk, on August 21, 1938. She became convinced that Bogart was unfaithful to her (which he eventually was, with Lauren Bacall, while filming To Have and Have Not in 1944). They drifted apart; Methot's drinking increased, and she threw plants, crockery and other objects at Bogart. She set their house afire, stabbed him with a knife, and slashed her wrists several times. Bogart needled her; apparently enjoying confrontation, he was sometimes violent as well. The press called them "the Battling Bogarts".
  According to their friend, Julius Epstein, "The Bogart-M
caption: Methot and Bogart with their dogs (1944)
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