Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart by Stefan Kanfer

(Knopf, 288 pages, $26.95)

“Why do we continue to need Humphrey Bogart?” asked Alyssa Rosenberg in The Atlantic. On the face of it, “it doesn’t actually make sense” that the late film star endures as a romantic hero when handsomer, more dashing actors were long ago relegated to the second tier. The question of Bogart’s enduring appeal goes unanswered by former Time film critic Stefan Kanfer in his sometimes thought-provoking new biography, but it’s always there. Bogart was scrawny (his Navy enlistment papers listed him at 5 feet 8 inches, 136 pounds), and he had a slight speech impediment and carried a scar on his upper lip. But against long odds, he has become a lasting symbol of American manhood.

The basic trajectory of Bogart’s life is riveting stuff, said Saul Austerlitz in The Boston Globe. The blueblood son of a Manhattan doctor, he was bound for Yale before sidestepping into the theater. He kicked around Broadway in bit roles, initially typecast, as Kanfer tells us, as “the eternal upper-class twit.” A tough-guy role in Robert Sherwood’s play The Petrified Forest then springboarded him to Hollywood and “a new career as a gun-toting villain.” After being gunned down in dozens of movies, Bogart finally became a star at age 42, when he lucked into the role of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Cancer would kill him just 15 years later.

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“The best part” of Kanfer’s book traces this icon’s early afterlife, said Henry Allen in The Wall Street Journal. He shows us various benchmark moments when the Bogie legacy was enhanced—a 1957 screening of Casablanca at Harvard that spawned a Bogart cult on college campuses, Jean-Paul Belmondo’s mimicking of Bogart’s sneer in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. What did we all see in him? A 1964 Radcliffe student, speaking perhaps for every American woman, described his appeal better than even Kanfer can: “Bogie’s direct and honest,” she said. “He gets involved with his women, but he doesn’t have an identity crisis very five minutes.”