Humphrey Bogart’s one and only appearance in a TV show: “I’d sooner dig ditches”
These days, nobody bats an eyelid when one of Hollywood’s biggest stars graces the small screen because the medium has evolved to a point where the best storytelling options are episodic in the age of endless franchise fare. Of course, things were different when Humphrey Bogart ruled the roost.
TV was still in its relative infancy, and it was viewed as an admission of defeat for any self-respecting actor’s career if they agreed to play a leading role in a recurring show. It signalled to the rest of the industry that their glory days were over and they’d semi-retired to a less demanding arena, and Tinseltown’s most famous names wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near a series.
Few came more famous than Bogart, the Academy Award-winning icon who’d become synonymous with ‘Golden Age’ success through a string of seminal films that included Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Sabrina, The Caine Mutiny, The African Queen, The Big Sleep, and many more.
Before he died at the age of just 57 in January 1957, though, Bogie crossed one significant omission from his to-do list when he made his first and only appearance on television. He despised the medium and considered it the home of young upstarts and irrelevant veterans, but there were two major reasons why he agreed to front an episode of the anthology series Producers’ Showcase that aired in May 1955.
The first was that it adapted Robert E Sherwood’s play, The Petrified Forest, and Bogart reprised the role of Duke Mantee that he’d already played in the original Broadway production and its 1936 feature-length adaptation. The second, and more important, was that he got to work with Lauren Bacall for the first time in almost a decade.
They hadn’t shared the screen together since 1948’s Key Largo, which was a dangled carrot he couldn’t turn down, with Henry Fonda rounding out a particularly star-studded central trio. “I look awful on television,” was his overriding memory of the experience. “Every pore on my face can be seen on those home screens. And you can imagine what I look like on sets with bad reception.”
Once he’d crossed the final frontier and made his small-screen debut, Bogart was inevitably inundated with offers. In the aftermath of performing The Petrified Forest on Producers’ Showcase, he was asked if he wanted to do a live staging of a play, a weekly adventure series, or a made-for-TV movie.
His response? “I’d sooner dig ditches.” It was the first role of what would be the penultimate year of his acting career, with Michael Curtiz’s We’re No Angels, Edward Dmytryk’s The Left Hand of God, and William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours releasing in July, September, and October 1955 before Bogart’s onscreen days drew to a close the following year with Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall.
The fates conspired to ensure that even if Bogart wanted to do more TV work, he wouldn’t be able to, although he made it pretty clear he could have lived to be a hundred years old and never done it again.
