THE hero in American movies fluctuates between two idealized personalities, whose common bond is an allegiance to Superman. One, the older, is a mixture of Abe Lincoln, Dick the Chimney Sweep and a cowboy, in which goodness and lonesome bravery are the main ingredients. The other is a belligerent, egocentric character who is as malevolent and aggressive as the other is pure of heart and backward; in the gangster-movie days he was called Blackie, now he is called by names like Rick, Joe Rossi and Sam Spade. He is acted mainly by Humphrey Bogart, but also by John Garfield, Alan Ladd, Brian Donlevy and George Raft.
The older-fashioned hero is a long-bodied, long-armed man whose air is one of troubled silence, and who grew up in the bleaker parts of the country to be shy, honest and not given to excesses. He doesn’t seek success, but because he is a physical genius he reaches the hero class and performs there as a good honest man would. He is probably the most likable person to see winning so many rewards, especially when his person is that of Gary Cooper (who had as much to do with shaping this movie personality as anyone else), Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda. His career, which the earliest pioneer first hacked out and which Hemingway revived by opening new worlds for him to conquer, is apt to be an untroubled one of physical superiority; but the faint tinge of tragedy latent in his personality sometimes leads at the end of the picture to the fact that he or his wife will die or that he must leave her in some far-off desert oasis, singing in a cabaret, to prove that the twain of East and West cannot meet for very long. Though he seems made for lonely nights out on the range, the picture of his love life is always one of wholesome, perfect, physical compatibility, and he is a conscientious, non-professional lover. He is seldom bothered about money, since he works outside the civilized world of business, and his few excursions into that world are in the roles of philanthropist or savior (“Mr. Deeds,” “Mr. Smith”).
The hero played by Mr. Bogart, which grew out of the gangster film and Dashiell Hammett detective novels, looks as though he had been knocked around daily and had spent his week-ends drinking himself unconscious in the back rooms of saloons. His favorite grimace is a hateful pulling back of the lips from his clenched teeth, and when his lips are together he seems to be holding back a mouthful of blood. The people he acts badly toward and spends his movie life exposing as fools are mainly underworld characters, like gangsters, cabaret owners and dance-hall girls (and the mayor whom he puts into office every year). Everything he does carries conflicting quantities of hatred and love, as though he felt you had just stepped on his face but hadn’t meant it. His love life is one in which the girl isn’t even a junior partner in the concern, his feeling about life is that it is a dog kennel, and he believes completely in the power of the money which he steals or works everyone else’s fingers to the bone to earn. He is the soured half of the American dream, which believes that if you are good, honest and persevering you will win the kewpie doll.
The character of this hero, who is the spit and image of hate-thy-neighbor, and who only milks human kindness, is nevertheless as popular as the nobler hero played by Gary Cooper. His mutilated good looks, plain, unbecoming clothes and slight stature are easier to project oneself into than the cowboy godliness of Mr. Cooper, and his vicarious, purple screen life is closer to one’s own day-dreaming of the most pleasurable kind of existence than the rigidly plain, pure one of Messrs. Deeds, Smith and Doe. Also Bogart lacks the forlorn pensiveness which, in Cooper, Fonda and Stewart, has a subtle poetry far less reassuring to movie audiences than his own noisy violence in which nothing is hidden. And in a world where so many people are doing things they dislike doing, Bogart expresses the hostility and rebellion the existence of which the Cooper tradition ignores. What the characters share are successful lives of extreme action, free of the routine matter of existence, which are carried out in dramatic places like a night club in Casablanca, in a cave in Spain or on the baseball field at Yankee Stadium, and which contain the untroubled string of physical victories that Hollywood feels Americans need and desire.
For the basic likeness is that both are men of action, with as little emphasis as will make sense on thought and emotion. Cooper’s screen life is taken up with proving his efficiency as a soldier, cowboy, baseball player, explorer, sea captain, adventurer and lover, and he seems unnatural only when he has also to stand for a message to mankind, as he did in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” or as a father, or when he has to show something lush or heartfelt in the way of emotion (the response being equivalent to tickling the mountain faces Gutzum Borglum carved). The main factor in all of Bogart’s careers of daring is his toughness—at one point in each movie he takes a horrible beating, but like a wrestler bounds back as good as new—and his ingenuity in a brawl. His movies are the ultimate in evil fighting methods, and he is a master of the surprise hold or kick, which takes a minimum of muscle and energy. For both of them it is the doing of the thing rather than the thinking it up or reacting to it that is important.
The anti-intellectual, anti-emotional and pro-action life of these heroes is in the historical American pattern, and perfectly suited to the movies, where movement and gesture are of so much importance (it is one that the Hollywood producer has embraced so wholeheartedly that he sees it as the only definition of cinematic movement). It is interesting to note that though the heroes have always been active, they have not always looked that way. D. W. Griffith’s heroes had sensitive, wistful faces, probably because Griffith dealt in stories whose heroes were hurt by society; then came an era when the gigolo face of Valentino or Novarro or Gilbert was thought appropriate both for lovers and adventurers; in the early thirties producers discovered that their stage-adopted habit of using cosmetics on the actor’s faces devitalized them, and the eye-penciling, hair-greasing and lipsticking was given up, with the result that the faces suggested aggression rather than passivity, the great outdoors rather than the boudoir.
Cooper and Bogart, the champions of their particular weights, are the reverse and obverse sides of the biggest, the most golden medal Hollywood has for heroes. Whatever may be said about the type of personality they play, they, as particular personalities, override any conventional facts in their screen life because they have the rich, visual vitality of which the greatest movie heroes will always be made.
October 18, 1943