How Humphrey Bogart Changed My Life
The lights come up, and I am transfixed. I didn’t know Hollywood made movies like this.
By ERIK MARSHALL
It’s 1992. I’m a French major, working toward a degree in education and a career teaching high school students French and English. I’m in a film class to fulfill a Visual and Performing Arts requirement, not because I have any particular interest in moving pictures. It was either that or take Dance History.
We have already seen Citizen Kane (1941) and other classics, but I am still just putting in time, hoping to get through the course, get my credit, and move on. Next up on the syllabus is Film Noir, whatever that is. My professor threads the film into the 16mm projector, turns off the lights, and starts In a Lonely Place (1950).
After the title sequence, full of seemingly interminable scenes of driving, we see the first confrontation: Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele, a screenwriter threatening to pick a fight with some sap at a stoplight because the sap’s girlfriend recognizes him. This guy is awesome, I think.
Continuing to watch, I see a tough guy with a soft heart, a guy who takes no nonsense but who doesn’t understand the most rudimentary social rules, someone who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him even if that disregard ruins his life.
I laugh at Bogart’s wisecracks, and I root for his antihero even as he messes up everything. I marvel at the storytelling — the murder takes a backseat to the character study, although I’m never absolutely convinced Bogart’s character didn’t do it.
The lights come up in the classroom, and I am transfixed. I didn’t know Hollywood made movies like this. I had never seen a Humphrey Bogart film, and I was now on a mission to see every one I could — and to watch as many films noirs I could.
For my class, I wrote a paper on Existentialism (a topic I knew about from French courses) and film noir, analyzing the scene in which Bogart’s Dixon doesn’t know how to use the grapefruit knife.
That’s right: in one semester, with In a Lonely Place as the focal point, I transformed from someone with a passing interest in cinema into a full-fledged cineaste. I continued to major in French but registered for as many film classes as possible.
Years later, while teaching high school, the film professor who introduced me to Humphrey Bogart called, asking if I were interested in enrolling in his PhD program — with me, a teaching assistant and him, my advisor. I jumped on the opportunity, quit teaching high school, and never looked back.
That one day in the dark, watching a film noir from 1950 changed the entire trajectory of my life, leading me to my present career as a film scholar and teacher.
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