BOGART AND HUSTON

A film critic celebrates one of cinema’s most fruitful writer-director alliances.

As longtime reviewer Segaloff writes in this admirably non-hagiographic book, Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) and John Huston (1906-87) “were friends who together produced an extraordinary screen legacy.” They teamed up for six films from 1941 to 1953, starting with Huston’s directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, an effort that rescued Bogart from the “relentless string of B-pictures” that the head of Warner Bros., Jack Warner, had consigned him to. Segaloff writes that, while previous books have been devoted to only one of the two men, his focuses on their collaboration and views their work “through the lens of their personalities, histories, interests, and the noteworthy times they spent together.” The conceit of writing a book about both men rather than just one isn’t as original as Segaloff suggests, but that doesn’t detract from his accounts of their long, frequently booze-soaked friendship and the films they made together. He charts classics from Key Largo (1948) to The African Queen (1951) to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and lesser efforts such as Beat the Devil (1953), a “cult movie” that “was born in compromise, planned in arrogance, filmed in panic, and released in desperation.” Segaloff documents each man’s many marriages and affairs and dramatizes the rift that developed after Bogart backtracked on his criticism of the House Un-American Activities Committee when Republicans questioned his loyalty. This is well-traveled ground, with stories that fans likely know, but it’s still fun to read about these two men and their respective misadventures. When Bogart was shooting Across the Pacific (1942), his marriage to Mayo Methot was going so poorly that, when he came home one day, she stabbed him with a kitchen knife. A doctor stitched him up, and “like a trouper, Bogart reported to work the next morning.”

Nothing new, but a pleasant read for fans.