Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) grew from a typecast tough to a superstar of the Hollywood system. A collection of films screening through Oct. 28, drawn primarily from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, underscores what MoMA calls “the canny mutability of both Bogart’s acting style and his choices of starring vehicles and directors.”
Highlights include:
“Marked Woman,” 1937, directed by Lloyd Bacon, also starring Bette Davis, has Bogart playing a DA combatting gangsters and the prostitutes they employ who persuades one, who fancies herself a “hostess,” to help him go after a crooked nightclub owner. (Sep. 28, 1:30 p.m.)
“To Have and Have Not,” 1944, directed by Howard Hawks, with a Jules Furthman-William Faulkner screenplay based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway, also stars Lauren Bacall and Walter Brennan in the introduction of the mythic Bogey and Bacall screen magic, where Bogart, an American boat owner in Martinique as apolitical as Rick in “Casablanca,” agrees — because he is strapped for cash — to transport a Resistance fighter on the run from the Nazis. (Oct. 5, 1:30 p.m.)
“Key Largo,” 1948, directed by John Huston, also starring Lauren Bacall, finds Bogart arriving to honor the memory of a wartime buddy and meeting his widow, his wheelchair-bound father, and a storm that leaves him in port long enough to take on the bad guys. (Oct. 6, 1:30 p.m.)
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” 1948, written and directed by John Huston, also starring Walter Huston, is the story of two adventurers who head to Mexico looking for good luck and some cash but run up against a wall of bandits and their own greed. (Oct. 7, 1:30 p.m.)
“The African Queen,” 1951, directed by John Huston, also starring Katharine Hepburn, in which Bogart helps Hepburn escape German East Africa in the only safe conveyance available, the titular rundown river steamboat. (Oct. 12 & 27, 1:30 p.m.)
“The Caine Mutiny,” 1954, directed by Edward Dmytryk and based on the Herman Wouk novel, also starring José Ferrer, Van Johnson, and Fred MacMurray, features Bogart as the tyrannical minesweeper commander Queeg. (Oct. 14, 1:30 p.m.)
“High Sierra,” 1941, directed by Raoul Walsh, with a screenplay by John Huston, has Bogart as a criminal ready to hang it up before he is pulled back in for one more heist, in a performance that New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote was “truly magnificent, that’s all.” (Oct. 26, 1:30 p.m.)
“Sabrina,” 1954, directed by Billy Wilder, also starring Audrey Hepburn and William Holden, about two brothers angling for the eye of the surprisingly sophisticated daughter of the family chauffeur. (Oct. 28, 1:30 p.m.)
Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St.
Tickets are $12; $10 for seniors; $8 for students at moma.org.
