Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  In Bold Venture he would play Slate Shannon, hotel proprietor and sailor; Lauren would be his ward, a sultry young woman named Sailor Duval. The script called for Shannon’s boat to encounter pirates, counterfeiters, and assorted lowlifes. The “adventure, intrigue, mystery and romance” would take place “in the sultry settings of tropical Havana and the mysterious islands of the Caribbean.” There was nothing inherently wrong with this idea—except that it bordered on self-parody, and that other caricatures were already at work sullying the Bogart brand name.

  Two animated shorts, for instance, mocked Humphrey as they amused audiences. In the racist “Bacall to Arms,” a cartoon Bogart and Bacall flirt with each other. She lights her cigarette with a blowtorch and he gets covered with charcoal. In blackface, Humphrey does an imitation of the hoarse-voiced Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Jack Benny’s African American butler. In “Slick Hare,” another Humphrey caricature bosses Elmer Fudd around in a restaurant (“Cut the gab and bring me an order of fried rabbit”). Bugs Bunny eludes them both, and the intimidator meekly settles for a ham sandwich.

  A novelty song followed. “All Right, Louie, Drop the Gun” was written by the husband-and-wife team of Ray Carter and Lucile Johnson. A man sings about his failed romance—every time he approaches his girlfriend, she hollers the title words, “All right, Louie, drop the gun,” a misquote from Casablanca. (What Rick actually says is “Not so fast, Louie.”)

  Humphrey’s company added to the general depreciation. Sirocco was Santana’s attempt to recapture the magic of Casablanca. The period piece took place in French-occupied Syria, circa 1925. Everything in the film had a strained air about it, including the central performance. During its preparation Humphrey spoke to New Yorker reporter Lillian Ross. “I’ve been doing the role for years,” he told her. “I’ve worn that trench coat of mine in half the pictures I’ve been in. What I don’t like is business worries.… I’m bowed down with business worries.” To cite one example, “Santana has had eleven writers on Sirocco, and none of them goons has come across with an ending yet.” A conclusion was eventually provided, and Humphrey wrapped his trench coat around the part of Harry Smith, a man out for Number One at all times. The gunrunner is a man described by a French colonel as having “no morals, no political convictions.” Smith remains that way until the finale, when he decides to act gallantly, takes the side of the good guys, and gets killed by a terrorist’s grenade. The co-star was the beautiful but uncharismatic Marta Toren; other than a Swedish accent (“How can a man so ogly be so handsome?” she asks Humphrey), the actress had none of Ingrid Bergman’s cinematic virtues. Lee J. Cobb, Everett Sloane, and Zero Mostel were supposed to lend the proceedings a raffish style, but their parts were underwritten and the performances fizzled. Curtis Bernhardt had previously directed Conflict. This time out, he provided little energy and no inspiration.

  The picture was held at arm’s length by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. To almost all of them Sirocco seemed a parody of a Bogart movie, studio-bound, the fez-topped costumes bogus, and the dialogue stilted and unconvincing. They got no argument from Humphrey; he was to acknowledge privately that Sirocco “was one we had to do. It stank, of course.” But being candid about doing a bad movie did nothing for his morale or for his deteriorating career. He had fallen from grace and he had done it while everyone was watching. And he had no one to blame but himself.

  Ironically, Santana was to salvage the Bogart reputation. Sandwiched between Humphrey’s bad choices was a modest noir thriller called In a Lonely Place. Nicholas Ray would go on to make some important films about loners and outsiders, among them Rebel Without a Cause and The Savage Innocents. But for many reasons this was his most personal work. Ray became an alchemist as he worked on Lonely Place, pushing Humphrey to the limit until he turned the star back into an artist. The actor who liked to affect the aura of a loner who insists on going his own way was in fact the neediest of all leading men. For without a gifted boss he was condemned to repeat himself in film after film. In this picture Nicholas Ray, like John Huston before him and after him, showed just how director-dependent Humphrey was.

  In a Lonely Place is character-driven in every sense. Before he has spoken a word, the male lead is described as a troubled figure with nowhere to go but down. The mise-en-scène made Humphrey uncomfortable, perhaps because it seemed a little too close to home. The character he played was a Hollywood personality, wellborn yet insecure, edgy, defensive, teasing, with a streak of violence hidden beneath a mask of politesse. The script offers a concise description:

  Into the scene, headed for Romanoff’s, comes Dixon “Dix” Steele. He is a tightly knit man with an air of controlled, spring-steel tension about him. He wears a well-cut, but well-worn tweed jacket and slacks.

  Mr. Steele—God help him—is a motion picture writer.

  That contradictory writer hasn’t had a hit in a decade. Dix makes a big point of putting down his colleagues for doing hackwork in the “popcorn business”—then tries to come up with a script based on a best-selling potboiler, even though he refuses to read it. The writer claims to have no interest in the human condition—but punches out a local hotshot for taunting his pal, a onetime movie star, now a washed-up rummy (played by Robert Warwick, an old pro who was in Humphrey’s first important play, Drifting). Thus far, it’s the Bogart of old—cynical, unyielding, yet with a patrician nobility winking just beneath the surface.

  In fact this was an entirely new kind of role for Humphrey, more mature than Sam Spade and more complicated than Fred C. Dobbs. On a whim, Dix invites a hatcheck girl, Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart), back to his apartment. Although Mildred is a pretty brunette, the offer is literary, not sexual. She’s read the novel and Dix wants her to tell him the story in easily assimilated form. Mildred is a simple girl; the screenwriter is bored to distraction. When she finishes talking, he sends her out into the night with barely concealed distaste. The next morning Mildred’s body is discovered on a deserted roadside. The young woman has been bludgeoned to death. Witnesses saw her leaving the restaurant with Steele; police regard him as a prime suspect. But before Dix can be arrested, a starlet named Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame, the real-life Mrs. Nicholas Ray) furnishes him with an ironclad alibi.

  Laurel lives across the way from the Steele apartment and testifies that she watched Mildred depart, leaving Dix alone in his well-lit living room. For the moment, the cops are satisfied. Screenwriter and starlet soon find they have a lot more in common than show business. A torrid affair begins. So does Dix’s new and inspired script, with a memorable self-portrait of the narrator: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” Even though Laurel falls under Dix’s spell, a dark suspicion lurks in the back of her mind—especially when she sees her lover in one of his rages. During a drive the couple gets sideswiped by another car. Dix leaps out and savagely beats the other driver. Only Laurel’s interference keeps him from killing the downed man with a rock. (Ray and Grahame were on the brink of divorce during the production and Steele is obviously a surrogate of Ray, forlorn, resentful, unable to assuage his grief or manage his rage.)

  Would Dix be capable of homicide? Laurel is not the only one who thinks he is. Steele’s agent, Mel Lippman (Art Smith), also believes his enigmatic client might actually be guilty of the Atkinson murder. By now Laurel is terrified of Dix—so terrified she agrees to marry him, fearing that he might kill her if she refuses. During one of his rare absences she tries to pack up and flee. Her fiancé comes to call, sees her luggage, and flies into an uncontrolled fury. Dix very nearly strangles Laurel, then pulls back, looking at his hands as if they belong to someone else. As the two catch their breath, the phone rings. A detective has some comforting words: Mildred’s boyfriend has confessed to the crime. The information comes too late. Dix may be innocent of one killing, but he has murdered any chance for love or stability. His line has a new meaning now: “I was born when she kissed me. I died w
hen she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”

  Humphrey had wanted to cast his wife as Miss Gray. This presented Jack Warner with an opportunity for revenge. He was always furious with the rebel for something; this time it was because Santana’s films were being released through Columbia instead of Warner Bros. He struck back. No, Mrs. Bogart would not be sprung from her contract with Warners, not even for this one picture. Jack had inadvertently done Humphrey a favor: Gloria happened to be ideal for the part. Had Lauren been cast, the film would have been a Bogart-Bacall product, with the leading lady reciting a lot of breathy lines and doing a series of long, suggestive poses—Vivian Rutledge in vamp mode. Grahame had a wide range and an edgy sense of humor that came across in every role.

  In her memoir, Louise Brooks denigrated many Bogart movies (as well as Bogart himself), but she had good things to say about In a Lonely Place. “Before inertia set in,” she wrote, Humphrey “played 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’s character, 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.” She had a point. Lauren Bacall’s autobiography speaks of a time just before her marriage when she went aboard Humphrey’s yacht. It could be a description of Dixon Steele at ebb tide: “I don’t know what happened this time—when or how the click in his brain took place—but suddenly he was fighting with me. I got more and more frightened. He started slamming his fists on the table, crying ‘You goddamn actresses are all alike.…’ I’d never seen fury like that—unreasonable, lashing out. I hated it.”

  Humphrey’s behavior was obviously inflamed by drink, but there was more to it than that. The constant needling he experienced in childhood continued to play out in situations where he felt cornered by others or confused by his own emotions. The best of Steele and the worst of Bogart crisscrossed several times in the movie. No doubt old memories were stirred up, and Humphrey didn’t know how to handle them except by playing the part as honestly as he could—and then, as usual, dissolving his fears and memories in alcohol.

  Lonely Place was not the only 1950 film to examine a self-loathing Hollywood. Every scene of Billy Wilder’s deeper, darker, and more polished Sunset Boulevard reveals the downside of fame and illusion, as a vain old movie star is cosseted and deceived by her younger lover and her adoring ex-husband. And even though All About Eve took place around Broadway, it was, after all, a movie about a diva pursued and eventually toppled by an ambitious newcomer. Its subtext was the impermanence of acclaim and the ruthlessness of show business on any stage, theatrical or sound. These features cannot be separated from history; at the beginning of the decade the film business was beset by the political blacklisting of employees, the disintegration of the studio system, and an unstable geopolitical climate. Inevitably some of the tension spilled over into the directions and performances.

  In many ways In a Lonely Place was the weakest of these three features. Yet Humphrey’s star turn, even more than Gloria Swanson’s in Sunset Boulevard and Bette Davis’s in All About Eve, edged closer to the neurotic fear of failure that has always characterized Hollywood, but that was at its most intense in the early 1950s. The picture was so powerful that when producer-director Curtis Hanson made L.A. Confidential, which takes place during the same period, he screened it for co-stars Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. “I wanted them to see the reality of that period and to see that emotion,” Hanson recalled. “When I first saw In a Lonely Place as a teenager, it frightened me and yet attracted me with an almost hypnotic power. Later, I came to understand why. Occasionally, very rarely, a movie feels so heartfelt, so emotional, so revealing that it seems as though both the actor and the director are standing naked before the audience. When that happens, it’s breathtaking.”

  In later years, Humphrey confessed that he never liked In a Lonely Place. It’s not hard to see why. Dixon Steele and Humphrey Bogart might have been blood brothers. Both went through life as if they had sand under their skins; both were oddly attractive men with high IQs; both were capable of quixotic kindness and uncontrollable rages that spilled over from difficult childhoods. Nicholas Ray was quick to take advantage of their similarities. Though many people claimed credit for the periodic resurrections of Humphrey’s career, Ray’s is the most credible: in creating Dixon Steele, he said, “I took the gun out of Bogart’s hands.”

  At this moment, the Bogart mystique took an unpredicted turn. By an accident of timing, Lonely Place announced the sunset of the brute/hero in American film. In previous years the role of a cruel or domineering male provided a gateway to eminence. It involved a measure of misogynism as well, for women were often the ones who made an obscure actor a star once he behaved badly on-screen. White Heat broke from the pack of crime movies when James Cagney slammed a grapefruit in the face of Mae Clark. In The Seventh Veil James Mason played Nicholas, the crippled and jealous guardian of a talented pianist Francesca (Ann Todd). During one of his outbursts he argues with Francesca as she plays—and suddenly brings his cane down on her fingers. The movie won an Academy Award, was the biggest box office success in 1946 Britain, and established Mason as a major star.

  A year later Richard Widmark made his screen debut as the homicidal lunatic Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death. In his big moment, Udo sneaks behind an old lady in a wheelchair, pushes her down a flight of stairs, and giggles about what he has just done. “The sadism of that character,” wrote critic David Thomson in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, “the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration-camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen.” Widmark received an Oscar nomination, and began a illustrious forty-year career in which he played a series of romantic leads.

  At the same time Robert Mitchum appeared in Out of the Past, the classic film noir that made him famous. Jeff, a laconic detective, is never less than blunt with females, deadly or otherwise: “You’re like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another.” When an ingenue protests that she’s innocent of a theft, his signature line is “Baby, I don’t care.” Toward the conclusion another woman pleads, “I don’t want to die!” His reply: “Neither do I, baby, but if I have to, I’m going to die last.”

  Dixon Steele was just about the last of these protagonists. Lonely Place received mixed reviews: Time called it a “Bogart melodrama that seems to take forever getting to the point,” but other important publications praised the film. Humphrey took special pleasure from the New York Times critique. Bosley Crowther, who had detested Knock on Any Door, proclaimed, “Humphrey Bogart is in top form in his latest independently made production, and the picture itself is a superior cut of melodrama.” As a quick-tempered screenwriter suspected of a capital crime, “Mr. Bogart looms large on the screen of the Paramount Theater and he moves flawlessly through a script which is almost as flinty as the actor himself.”

  Variety indicated that, short fuse and all, Dix Steele was sympathetic because “he favors the underdog; in one instance he virtually has a veteran, brandy-soaking character (out of work) on his very limited payroll.… Director Nicholas Ray maintains nice suspense. Bogart is excellent. Gloria Grahame, as his romance, also rates kudos.”

  The feature had great importance for Humphrey. For the first time in more than a year he had truly acted a part instead of walking through it. He took satisfaction in the praise of journalists and colleagues, but worried anew when the public failed to share their enthusiasm. Was it time to sell off Santana, get the company off his back? Soon, maybe; right now he had other things on his mind. Lauren was unhappy at Warners. The scripts she was being offered were never up to snuff; it was as if the studio was trying to get back at him through his wife. Well, the hell with Jack Warner.
There was another studio and a new script out there for Humphrey. The trouble was, it involved something he hated: travel. To Africa, no less.

  ii

  The journey began with a call from John Huston. Always one for the idée fixe, the director had become obsessed with a novel published back in 1935. “Bogie,” he began, “I’ve got a helluva property—with the worst low-life character in the world as the hero—and you’re Hollywood’s worst form of life. How about it?”

  The leading lady had already been enticed, thanks to a producer who never took maybe for an answer. She remembered their first conversation. “Hello, Miss Hepburn,” said the purling voice on the other end of the phone. “I’m Sam Spiegel. I’m going to do a picture with John Huston—it’s by C. S. Forester and it’s called The African Queen.”

  There was a backstory here. There was always a backstory with Spiegel. Born in western Galicia in 1901, the bright Jewish boy joined the Zionist movement in adolescence, married, and settled in Palestine. Seven years later he abandoned his wife, daughter, and assorted debts to assume a new life in the United States. Claiming to be a diplomat, he was investigated, found to be a fraud, and wound up serving a nine-month prison sentence. Upon release he fled to Europe. There, with a combination of chutzpah and charm, he managed to produce three films, none of any note.