Star of the Month: Humphrey Bogart
TCM, beginning at 8 p.m.
Humphrey Bogart, one of the greatest male movie stars of Hollywood’s classic age and whose legendary performances endure and continue to entertain modern audiences, is Turner Classic Movies’ Star of the Month in September. Each Thursday night (and usually well into the following day), the network will spotlight some of Bogie’s most memorable films grouped according to a particular theme. Tonight’s lineup highlights movies featuring Bogart’s collaborations with two people with whom he had his most impactful personal and professional relationships: writer/director John Huston and actress Lauren Bacall. Up first, enjoy Bogie leading five productions directed by Huston: The African Queen (1951), which won Bogart a Best Actor Oscar, and earned a Best Director nomination for Huston, along with a nod for the screenplay he cowrote with James Agee, and a Best Actress nomination for costar Katharine Hepburn; The Maltese Falcon (1941), the iconic film noir with Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade, featuring Huston’s Oscar-nominated screenplay adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel; the wartime spy film Across the Pacific
(1942); the Best Picture Oscar-nominated The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), which earned Huston Academy Awards for directing and his screenplay; and the 1948 film noir Key Largo. That last film was the final onscreen pairing of Bogie and Bacall, which segues nicely into airings of the other three movies that the iconic Hollywood couple made together: To Have and Have Not (1944), their first big-screen collaboration and the production on which they began their famed romance, which was also Bacall’s overall feature film debut and includes her famous “just whistle” quote; The Big Sleep (1946), with Bogie playing his other famous film noir detective, Philip Marlowe; and the 1947 mystery thriller Dark Passage.
— Jeff Pfeiffer