Genuine big screen romance is a hard one to pull off, so hard that many films don't even bother. Rather than develop a relationship that feels real on all levels, filmmakers often communicate love through a kind of shorthand. Here's a handsome guy. There's a pretty girl. Something cute happens. Maybe they bicker. At the end of the film they're totally making out. It's about as emotionally moving as watching some new lady fall in love with James Bond.
Of the cinematic romances that actually stay with people, many gain poignancy through unconventional pairings. Films like Harold & Maude, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and newer entries such as Moonrise Kingdom all focus on atypical romantic couples and yet supply warm, meaningful relationships. For whatever reason, it's easier to fall for a romance between two ugly aliens than some cinematic fling between Sarah Jessica Parker and, say, Dylan McDermott (unless they're playing ugly aliens).
No actor I know of has succeeded at illustrating this notion better than Humphrey Bogart. A quintessential representation of an increasingly antiquated era, Bogart's highly specific particularities would have little chance of making it in films today, save maybe as a character actor. Even as a young man, he resembles someone's grandfather. And yet, my absolute favorite romances are all Humphrey Bogart films.
I don't see how any straightforward love story could top The African Queen. The film grows even greater the older it gets because it so frequently teases modern expectations only to casually avoid them and give us something pleasantly surprising instead. Bogart's rogue riverboat captain and Katharine Hepburn's straight-laced spinster are neither as roguish and straight-laced as we predict. He ends up being a total softy. Meanwhile she shamelessly revels in the dangerous excitement and violent freedom fighting their adventure provides.
While they bicker and flirtatiously eye each other in turn, their romance occurs with the flip of a switch and even catches us a little off-guard. The film's chastity is part of its charm. The couple's closest proximity to sexual tension comes via baths on opposite sides of the boat in full-body undergarments. Their sudden unity comes across not with physical passion but mere smiles and the warmth with which Hepburn shifts from calling Bogart "Dear" instead of "Mr. Allnut."
But they are, put simply, absolutely adorable together, and because their journey involves leeches, makeshift torpedoes and an impromptu wedding at the gallows, it's an adorability that exists within an adventure context, rather than driving the story altogether. Whether they fall in love or not, they are still going to drive the Queen right into a massive German gunboat. They are badasses first, lovers second.
This idea carries over somewhat into the wartime lost-love we find in Casablanca. Among so many other merits, Casablanca succeeds because it tells the story of a sub-hero who must give up the woman he loves to a far bigger hero than himself. In typical love triangle narratives, we usually expect the pining party to have greater merits than the jockey jerk who ends up with the girl, but in this case Bogart's Rick Blaine never had a chance with Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa Lund. His rival, Paul Henreid's Victor Laszlo, is an already legendary man of action and importance. Furthermore, his love for Ilsa is just as genuine and large as Rick's, if not larger.
Rick holds the key to Victor and Ilsa's shared escape from Casablanca. He could have her, free and clear of Laszlo. Doing so, however, would not only split up a near mythical romance already in progress, but could also rob the Nazi Resistance Movement of a powerful ally. So Rick forgoes his own happiness for the greater good, a conclusion with all the sadness of a tragic romance but without the benefit of death or histrionics.
This could also be said for Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place. The romance here between Bogart and co-star Gloria Grahame explores a much darker love than the slight bitterness found in Casablanca. While The African Queen highlight's Bogart's stance as a rugged everyman and Casablanca smolders in the weary but quick-witted charm that informed many of his private eye characters, In a Lonely Place is all about psycho Bogart.
Bogart's Dixon Steele and Grahame's Laurel Gray meet when she supplies him with an alibi for a murder we slowly realize he may have committed after all. The two fall in love soon after, and the new romance invigorates the normally hotheaded and unhinged Steele. He stops drinking and grows almost giddy with happiness. But at his worst, Steele still displays severe anger issues and violent tendencies that put Gray in danger.
Steele and Gray's entire relationship dances on the edge of a knife and paradoxically generates a better romance for it. Bogart supplies the film with a character equally terrifying and compelling, and you genuinely want to see him keep the happiness he finds with Gray. The film's central tension revolves around whether or not Gray can fix this broken, dangerous man and ends with her giving up the fight. You don't blame her, but that does't make the conclusion any less heartbreaking.
There's just something about Humphrey Bogart. For a guy defined either by toughness, street-smarts or insanity, he stands as one of cinema's all-time great romantic leading men. Even the largely platonic female relationships found in The Barefoot Contessa or Key Largo, for instance, still feel particularly moving and special. If I were a lady, and if I had a time machine (that worked!), I would totally try to hook up with him and/or have him walk me down the aisle at my wedding. Maybe to Jack Palance.
This was originally published in the February edition of Birth.Movies.Death. See Casablanca at the Alamo Drafthouse this month!