Here’s looking at you, Bogie. Warner Home Video’s “Humphrey Bogart Collection” rounds up the usual suspects on VHS, among them “High Sierra,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Casablanca,” as well as new-to-DVD special editions of “The Maltese Falcon,” “Key Largo” and “The Big Sleep” (which includes both the more popularly known 1946 version and the rarely seen 1945 pre-release version).
But of special interest to Bogart fans will be the video-only premieres of “Black Legion,” “The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse” and “The Wagons Roll at Night,” three vintage films in which the long-time supporting actor was poised to break out as a leading man. Each retails for $15.
Last year, the American Film Institute voted Bogart the No. 1 male screen legend. Film historian and “Entertainment Tonight” movie critic Leonard Maltin agrees. “I hate lists,” he says in a phone interview. “I can only tell you that he’s my favorite. Is he a better actor than Laurence Olivier? Probably not. Is he a better actor than Marlon Brando? Probably not. But he may have been a better movie star, and he was a damn good actor.”
As witness “Black Legion” (1936), a ripped-from-the-headlines melodrama in the classic Warner Bros. crime films tradition. It afforded Bogart his first leading role in a major film.
In a departure from the hard-boiled heavies he played opposite Warner leading men James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, Bogart gives a revelatory performance as Frank Taylor, a blue-collar factory worker who loses an anticipated promotion to a “foreigner.”
Embittered, he becomes involved with the Black Legion, who set themselves up as “the new Ku Klux Klan.” Its members take an oath “to God and the Devil” to fight for a “free, white 100-percent America.”
Taylor and the Legion burn homes, administer whippings and loot foreign-owned businesses. When his beloved wife leaves him, he tries to get out, but they keep pulling him back in.
“The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse” (1938) is more a vehicle for Robinson, who stars as the doctor with a “scientific curiosity” in crime and criminals. To research a book on the medical aspects of crime, he pulls off four perfect crimes in four weeks.
Bogart’s role as safecracker “Rocks” Valentine is characteristic of the gangster roles that initially put him on the Hollywood map. The unflappable Robinson is great, but any movie where Bogart spits out such lines as “I give the orders from now on, see” and “You’ll take it and like it,” is OK by me.
Bogart, Robinson and co-star Claire Trevor would be reunited 10 years later in “Key Largo,” which was directed by John Huston, who co-wrote “Clitterhouse” and would direct Bogart’s breakthrough film, “The Maltese Falcon.”
“The Wagons Roll at Night” (1941) is the least of the three, but as Maltin says, “I’d still rather watch [it] than much of what comes out today, because at least it has some pizazz.”
In this circus — yes, circus — drama, Eddie Albert is the hero and Bogart, as Nick Coster, proprietor of Coster’s Coney Island Carnival, is the heel. Albert co-stars as Matt Varney, the hardware-store-clerk-turned-lion-tamer, who falls in love with Nick’s sister. Nick has shielded her from “roadshow vermin” by sending her to a convent. But she’s out now and in love with Matt. The enraged Bogart literally throws him to the lions. “We’re in Chicago,” he declares in a line that alone is worth the price of the video. “We’ve got to give them something sensational.”
Mostly during this period, Maltin notes, “Bogart played second fiddle to Robinson, Cagney, Bette Davis and all the Warner Bros. powerhouse stars. That seemed to be his lot in life until he finally established himself in the early ’40s as being capable of carrying a picture.” He would do that with his next film, “The Maltese Falcon.
