Flying Fists

A pair of screen legends, Humphrey Bogart and Kirk Douglas, will be honored with film series starting Friday. “Here’s Looking at You, Bogie” commences Friday at 7:30 p.m. in L.A. County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater with “High Sierra” and “The Maltese Falcon,” the two 1941 films that confirmed Bogart’s stardom two decades after he began his acting career in the theater. The series is sponsored by Hugh Hefner. The American Film Institute’s “Kirk Douglas: An American Classic” starts at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills with “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” (1946), which marked Douglas’ screen debut, and the 1947 film noir classic “Out of the Past.”

The Bogart series, which runs through Jan. 29, follows last year’s centennial of Bogart’s birth and his selection as the 20th century’s top American male movie star in an AFI poll of more than 1,800 film professionals. The Douglas retrospective, first presented in New York last month, coincides with Douglas’ return to the screen in “Diamonds,” following his stroke two years ago.

The two series offer a study in contrasts. Both Bogart and Douglas are virile, two-fisted tough guys. They are blessed with distinctive good looks, rather than blandly conventional handsomeness, and with strong, inimitable voices. Both are stars in the sense that instead of losing themselves in the characters they play, they absorb a wide range of types within their own indelible personalities. Bogart represented the definitive urban male, a loner who lived by his own code, respected by men and devastating to women. Barely two years after his death in 1957 from cancer, Bogart was treated as a screen icon to be emulated by Jean-Paul Belmondo’s petty gangster in “Breathless,” Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave classic, and revivals of his films have never stopped. Bogart, however, could step away from his romantic image of timeless cool to become a superb character actor--see his self-deceiving Fred C. Dobbs in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” his unlikely boozy lover of a prim Katharine Hepburn in “The African Queen” or his mentally unstable Capt. Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny.”

Douglas has been going strong for more than half a century, which is more than long enough for his gifts also to have stood the test of time. Whereas Bogart strove for a low-key, normal-guy unpretentiousness, Douglas has often embraced chesty, larger-than-life characters--and with terrific brio. He could embody film noir postwar neuroses, and in action-adventure films also be a throwback to Douglas Fairbanks swashbuck-ling. Douglas is also at home on the range, with a string of notable westerns to his credit, whereas Bogart seemed out of place on the frontier in the few times he ventured there. (Never mind that both stars were from New York.) Douglas has always taken chances--as in Stanley Kubrick’s antiwar classic “Paths of Glory” and as Vincent Van Gogh in Vincente Minnelli’s “Lust for Life.” Minnelli was the ideal director for Douglas, who was unforgettable as an ambitious young Hollywood producer in “The Bad and the Beautiful” and as another Hollywood type, transplanted to Rome, in Minnelli’s lesser-known (and butchered) “Two Weeks in Another Town.” The link between Bogart and Douglas is Lauren Bacall, Bogart’s widow and most memorable co-star; Bacall is Douglas’ leading lady in the current “Diamonds,” as she was half a century earlier in “Young Man With a Horn,” in which Douglas played a jazz legend based on Bix Beiderbecke.

*

Raoul Walsh’s “High Sierra” is the pivotal film that at last established Bogart as a star--even though Ida Lupino was billed above him, and he reportedly got the role of doomed gangster Roy Earle only after both Paul Muni and George Raft turned it down. (Bogart had made a strong impression as another gangster, in 1936’s “The Petrified Forest,” but that was a supporting role.) Earle was a perfect fit for Bogart. A bank robber serving a life sentence, Earle gets sprung after serving eight years through the efforts of a dying gangster pal (Donald MacBride), who wants him to come out to the coast to pull one last job.

You know from the start something’s got to go wrong. From his deathbed, MacBride has been able to line up only a trio of callow youths (Arthur Kennedy, Alan Curtis, Cornel Wilde)--but there is Curtis’ girl, Marie (Lupino), a real stand-up type who’s also been knocked around by life. Her attraction for Earle is immediate, but Earle has been deeply touched by a lame country girl (Joan Leslie) with whom he has crossed paths on his way from Illinois to California.

Adapted by John Huston and W.R. Burnett from Burnett’s novel--Burnett also wrote “Little Caesar” and “Scarface”--”High Sierra” is one of the great archetypal movies with enduring and widespread influence. Bogart’s Roy Earle might not have been the screen’s first “good bad” guy, a man who lives by his own code of integrity, but surely Earle is the definitive one. You can discover the impact of “High Sierra” in numerous French films, especially those of the late Jean-Pierre Melville. There’s also a lot of this Walsh film in Huston’s “Asphalt Jungle,” especially in Earle’s longing to return to the rural innocence of his youth.

*

Significantly, “High Sierra” and “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” were both produced by one of Hollywood’s all-time greats, Hal B. Wallis. Along with Bogart’s classic Earle is Lupino’s brave yet vulnerable Marie, elicited by Walsh’s vital direction.

What makes “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” so fascinating today is that it keeps breaking through its lurid ‘40s melodrama plotting to touch on timeless truths about the temptations of power and wealth and the capriciousness of fate. Indeed, its major theme is the tragedy of a life based on lies.

An itinerant gambler (Van Heflin) who’s also a pugnacious war hero returns to his hometown, from which he had run away to join the circus as an adolescent. His unexpected reappearance causes great consternation for his childhood sweetheart (Barbara Stanwyck), who had hoped to run away with him, and her alcoholic husband (Kirk Douglas), the local district attorney.

Stanwyck finds herself strongly attracted to Heflin, while Douglas, instantly jealous, assumes Heflin has blackmail in mind regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of Stanwyck’s cruel, dominating aunt (Judith Anderson). The aunt’s death has left her niece the rich and powerful owner of the local mill.

While Stanwyck is throwing herself at Heflin, Douglas has the local police menacing him and his new girlfriend, a sultry loser (Lizabeth Scott). Despite the arbitrariness of mushrooming plot complications, there does emerge a sense of the treacherousness and inescapability of the past. And although Stanwyck’s character is in the mold of the tough ‘40s femme fatale, Stanwyck and writer Robert Rossen have managed to imbue her with a tragic dimension.

Although Lewis Milestone’s direction is anything but subtle--and is further underlined by Miklos Rosza’s florid, incessant score--it is firm. As the film’s actual central figure, Heflin is forceful, striking a note of normalcy in a heady neurotic atmosphere. In his film debut, Douglas is as intense and compelling as he has been on so many occasions since.

Apart from certain celebrated films noir, the majority of Hollywood films of the ‘40s tend to suffer from a pervasive heaviness and artificiality (and a Production Code-dictated obeisance to morality.) A sleek studio production, “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” is very much of its era, yet, thanks largely to the honesty Rossen was able to inject into the script, it looks toward a more candid future.

*

“The Maltese Falcon,” in which Bogart became definitive Dashiell Hammett private eye Sam Spade, confirmed Bogart’s stardom, just as his next picture, “Casablanca,” would make him a legend. Shrewd, courageous and witty, Spade is drawn into a net of lethal intrigue when he’s approached by Mary Astor’s treacherous Brigid O’Shaughnessy; she’s mixed up with Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr. in the pursuit of an antique falcon statuette, whose black enamel coating is said to be hiding a crust of gems worth $1 million. John Huston’s adaptation and direction keep the picture, which is pure pleasure to watch, as fresh as the day it was released, and Bogart emerged as a hero who could convincingly put principle above love and not play the sap for anyone, not even a beautiful woman. LACMA: (323) 857-6010; Music Hall: (310) 274-6869.