Watching an early film, one of the first in which the now 30+ year-old Bogie got to play the lead, I was really struck by how much he changed and developed as an actor---and as a man---in less than a decade. He's almost a symbol for American men who went to war as boys and came home men, even though Bogart was too old for service in WWII. Maybe his stretch with the hard drinking Mayo Methot and his own alcoholism had much to do with this rapid change, along with increasingly fiercer battles with studio head Jack Warner when his confidence grew. Something had to recover that promising breakthrough in The Petrified Forest, but in the mean time Bogie did some curious films, to say the least.
The early movie I refered to is Love Affair (1932), directed by Thornton Freeman, and which I got to see for the first time this weekend thanks to a friend's generosity with his DVR.
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
![Image](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_R5WS6_kmmTI/TSvAIwkUkmI/AAAAAAAA7CE/Db3Y0GizWKs/s320/mmdloaf_ec003_h.jpg)
This isn't the classic love affair twice served by the brilliant Leo McCarey, and certainly not the best indication that Humphrey Bogart would one day become a romantic icon. He's still very light on his feet at this point, palpably wet behind the years and looks so slight that I didn't think he needed a plane to fly away. But he plays a airline engineer who falls in love with a somewhat jaded heiress (British born Dorothy Mackaill). Mackaill reminds me a lot of Claire Trevor in her demeanor, suggestive of a woman whose fires are kind of banked, just waiting, but not hoping anymore, for someone to come and light up her belief in life and love again. Her character's situation in life is not too clear beyond showing her living well and high, throwing her money and weight around and putting on a show of thrill seeking while at the same time seeming detached, as though her heart wasn't in it. She seems somehow older than Bogie and infinitely wiser (she was in reality just a few years younger than him).
![Image](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_qB_dIrLWN44/SxPlNFpD2TI/AAAAAAAABQo/7Y48vXQy6gE/s1600/xo844hg0tfw9t0w4.jpg)
Humphrey Bogart and Dorothy Mackaill in Love Affair (1932). I presume that's director Thornton by the camera.
Things start out rocky because she's got the world by the tail and he's just starting out, an engineer with an idea for a motor that, like John Galt's, will power the world. She picked him up at Gilligan's flight school, and took him home after a rather silly three hour tour up in the air. When they get to her apartment its filled with swells, moochers, her sugar daddy and Kibbee, her sweet, befuddled manservant (Halliwell Hobbes). When Dorothy procedes to put Kibbee up on the auction block, Bogie thinks its time to make his exit from this bunch of monkeys.
She finds out where Bogie lives and confronts him about bailing on her party, but not much is made of that potentional conflict of class or values. Instead, looking so frail without his shirt on, Bogie stammers some excuse and is soon bubbling ( ! ) with excitement as he shows her his model engine.
It later turns out she wants to finance his dream with her now-and-then fiance's money (Hale Hamilton as "Bruce Hardy" who has, without her knowledge, been her over-draft protection after she's written one too many blank checks), but Bogie won't have that...though he will have Dorothy, that night, and this makes his character seem unable to make up his own mind.
![Image](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_R5WS6_kmmTI/TSu_rM_e8ZI/AAAAAAAA7B8/PJToW06m5rw/s1600/affair2.jpg)
Bogie's "Jim Leonard" is, like a few of his early, non-gangster characters, a bit wishy-washy, even naive. Like a rabbit among the foxes, even his kid sister seems to be more cynical and scheming than he can grasp. Not only did his girlfriend slip one by him by starting-up his motor company with the money of another man, but his gold-digging baby sister (Astrid Allwyn) is the mistress of this same Hale and hearty Hardy! Funny stuff. I guess Bogart didn't learn his lesson because another girl would give him a "kick in the stomach" nine years later, at a train station in Paris. But by then he'd grown a spikey, care-worn shell and developed a cynical weight on screen that left you unprepared for anyone pulling the wool over him. Love Affair is a curiosity any fan of Bogie should see at least once if only to appreciate how far he came from this rather touchingly callow young man in 1932.
Love Affair is on DVD as part of Bogart's Columbia Pictures Collection.