Clint Eastwood’s favourite Humphrey Bogart movies
For most modern-day cinemagoers, Clint Eastwood has been a constant fixture of the Hollywood realm, boasting a career going all the way back to the mid-1950s, and encapsulating some of the most iconic films of all time along the way. Even still, there are some Hollywood greats that the actor still stands in awe of, and Humphrey Bogart is certainly one of them.
It is difficult to overemphasise the impact of Bogart on the American cinema industry during its formative years. After rising through the ranks of Broadway, the New York native made his first appearance on the silver screen back in 1930 and wasted no time in establishing himself among the defining faces of Hollywood’s so-called golden age.
Ultimately, it is impossible to delve into every one of Bogart’s iconic roles within the confines of this article, but whether it is the timeless romanticism of Casablanca, the pioneering noir mastery of The Maltese Falcon, or his countless legendary roles within the world of gangster films, it is safe to say that the actor certainly left his mark on the film industry.
With that incredible impact, there aren’t many actors in the game who do not owe some of their craft to the extensive filmography of Humphrey Bogart, and Clint Eastwood has always been particularly influenced by the veteran actor.
By the time Eastwood made his first mark on the film industry, with a string of often uncredited appearances in various long-forgotten flops prior to his run on Rawhide, Bogart was already reaching the end of his career. After living the luxurious life of Hollywood excess and enjoying every moment of it, the actor succumbed to oesophageal cancer in 1957, but his physical passing certainly didn’t mark the end of his cinematic legacy.
Even still, Bogart’s extensive body of work is far too often cherry-picked, according to Clint Eastwood. “Usually a person is either remembered for a great body of work that they’ve done in their lifetime or else they’re remembered for one or two really great things,” he once declared, per Paul Nelson’s Conversations with Clint.
Given that Eastwood’s own extensive filmography is often reduced to his masterful trilogy of performances as ‘The Man With No Name’ back in the 1960s, it is fair to say that the actor is intimately familiar with that fact. “When you think of Bogart, you think of Sierra Madre and The African Queen and The Maltese Falcon,” Eastwood continued, highlighting some of the notable highlights from Bogart’s life.
Those few favourites barely scratch the surface of the actor’s work, though. “There’s a lot of in-between stuff that you can’t even remember the name of because you purposely put them out of your mind,” Eastwood continued. “The Left Hand of God and many, many others.”
While that particular late-period Bogart flick might not have been one of his greatest, the aforementioned trilogy of favourites plucked out by Eastwood is hard to deny.
If you look at Bogart’s performances in those three films, in fact, it is pretty easy to draw the parallels between himself and the kind of performances Eastwood was stretching for, particularly during the early days of his Hollywood career.
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