ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 17, 1997 TAG: 9701170022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: COMMMENTARY
SOURCE: STEPHEN WHITTY KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
You must remember this.
The clothes, standard-issue masculine, but usually including a deeply creased fedora and a tightly belted trench coat. The cigarettes, short and unfiltered and inhaled with a squint.
And the voice - slightly lisping, vaguely gravelly, bitterly amused.
``You're good. You're awful good.''
``I stick my neck out for nobody.''
``We'll always have Paris.''
Humphrey Bogart died 40 years ago this month, yet unlike many of his contemporaries, his myth remains undimmed. Simply whisper, ``Bogie,'' and you immediately conjure up a complicated character: romantic, cynical, stubborn. See a Bogart movie, and you see a full-blooded man.
There have been tributes to him recently. An Entertainment Weekly poll named him our greatest star; this month, TNT is broadcasting classic Bogie movies and dreadful documentaries around the clock. Yet even these respectful honors can't make Bogart respectable; even putting his movies in a museum can't reduce him to a museum piece.
There were other actors who had some of his tough-guy appeal; Jimmy Cagney practically invented the modern antihero. But Cagney's greatest characters were creatures of the Depression; Bogart's came out of the war, and they had a modern world-weariness and a flawed heroism that makes them seem completely contemporary today.
You can see the complexity of that character in ``Casablanca,'' in which Bogart is a stand-in for prewar America - capable, successful and reluctant to get involved in other people's troubles. You can see it in ``In a Lonely Place,'' too, in which he struggles with his own violence, or in ``The Harder They Fall,'' in which he attempts to sell out by degrees.
His work is at its strongest, perhaps, in the movies he did for his great good friend John Huston, among them ``The Maltese Falcon,'' ``Key Largo'' and ``The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'' All are stories about men trying to resist - and sometimes failing to resist - the corruptions of the world. Even when both men played the tale for burlesque, in ``The African Queen,'' they couldn't disguise the seriousness of that character or the nobility of its final self-sacrifice.
Bogart was, of course, an actor; some of what we see up on that screen is being expertly faked. He was the son of a wealthy Manhattan surgeon and a renowned illustrator; he could never completely disguise his preppy background (just listen to the way he pronounces ``bourbon'' in ``Casablanca''). He was not the genuine tough that Cagney was, or George Raft.
But there were some things Bogart could not counterfeit, some parts of his movie character that were always part of his life. The rich boy who, drummed out of prep school, strode off to enlist in the Navy - that was Bogart. The star who feuded with bosses and bullies - that was Bogart, as well.
And that middle-aged cancer patient - that 57-year-old man who would laboriously get dressed, have himself brought down to his living room in a dumbwaiter? And then grimly smile as he nightly entertained well-wishers, as his young lovely wife stood tight-lipped by his side?
That was Bogart, too, and it was perhaps his finest role. He had shown a generation of young filmgoers how to live. Now he was showing another generation how to die - with dignity, with style, with class.
Here's looking at you, kid. And here's to the movies you left behind.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Humphrey Bogart died 40 years ago this month, but simplyby CNBwhisper, ``Bogie,'' and you immediately conjure up a complicated
character: romantic, cynical, stubborn.