Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 40
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Popular Culture Review
American” during the war), “red meat” crime men “roughed up” tough, sexually
transgressive “dangerous” women in wartime-early postwar narratives (such as
G il da, initiated in 1944, produced in 1945, released in 1946). Moreover, publicity
promoted violence (simulating combat) and misogynism (male stars beating up
female co-stars) as hard-hitting “realism.”
One of the most powerful creative forces at wartime Warner Bros, was
producer-director Howard Hawks (who was also actively involved in the writing/
adaptation process of his films). Hawks was savvy enough to recognize the lucrative
potential of Warner Bros.’ formula for success, C asablanca, in adapting the fiction
of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler during the war as an ideal masculine
star vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and new female co-star discovery, Lauren Bacall.
Humphrey Bogart embodied 1940s American masculinity on Hollywood
screens. His tough but often conflicted male image captured the spirit of hard
bitten wartime (and, later, postwar) cultural experience and the destabilized
psychological framework of film noir. Bogart had been known for his supporting
roles as crime “heavy” in 1930s Warner Bros, gangster and B films, but his big
break was the lead role as sympathetic crime hero, Roy Earle, in High Sierra. By
1941, the former criminal catapulted to stardom as private detective Sam Spade in
The M altese Falcon, then played an anti-Nazi gambler in A ll Through the N ight
and a trenchcoat-clad undercover military counter-espionage agent thwarting
Japanese subversives in Across the Pacific. Bogart finally confirmed his A-film
star status as tormented rugged individualist turned romantic wartime patriot, Rick
Blaine, by 1942 in C asablanca. These roles solidified and consolidated his
masculine screen persona. (Soon after, Bogart was loaned to Columbia studio to
portray a tough, scrappy military leader of a remote ragtag desert combat squad
who at first is uncompromising and psychologically conflicted, then humanized
and ultimately “reformed” as Allied war hero in the 1943 film, Sahara.) Bogart’s
star persona was later reformulated from wartime antihero to postwar urban
individualist in Hollywood’s transitional shift from war-related to non-war-related
(“red meat” crime) production and promotion strategies as evident in Howard
Hawks’ dark film s noir To H ave and H ave Ao/ (1944) and The B ig Sleep (1946).
Bogart’s model of tormented 1940s noir masculinity in wartime (and
postwar) narratives related not only to grufifhard-boiled adaptation source material,
but also to the reworking of gangster film cycles during the war, particularly since
the classical genre’s protagonist and unethical/illegal ideology was determined to
be “un-American,” banned as unpatriotic, and censored by the government’s Office
of Censorship throughout World War II.^ Following The M altese Falcon and
C asablanca, Warners cast the former gangster as a patriotic war hero/fatal martyr
in Warners’ P a ssage to M arseille (released in 1944), but not before the studio cast
him as a “heavy” murdering his estranged wife (after eyeing her younger sister) in