The movie Humphrey Bogart was blackmailed into making: “I just can’t do it”
While it’s easy to assume that the biggest stars in the business can’t be forced into doing anything they don’t want to do, things were different in ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood, and not even Humphrey Bogart was immune to threats, intimidation, ultimatums, and blackmail.
By the early 1940s, he was already sitting comfortably on the A-list. John Huston’s seminal noir, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, had rocketed him toward household name status, and Casablanca enshrined Bogart as one of his generation’s foremost leading men, which comes with its own set of benefits.
Michael Curtiz’s timeless romance had also made ‘Bogie’ one of the most in-demand leading men in Tinseltown, and he was being inundated with offers. Like most performers in his position, he was afforded a certain amount of leeway, but Jack Warner refused to take no for an answer when he requested that Bogart play the lead role in a production tentatively titled Pentacle.
Having read the script, he had absolutely no interest whatsoever in lending his name to the film. However, Warner had other ideas. The studio mogul viewed himself as being single-handedly responsible for turning Bogart into the star he’d become, and he didn’t take too kindly to being rejected. This being the age of the contract system, he decided to indulge his petty side.
Instead of Pentacle, which was eventually retitled Conflict, Bogart wanted to star in Passage to Marseille, a war epic that would reunite him with his Casablanca director, Curtiz. Unfortunately, it was also a Warner Bros production, and the bossman laid down the law and outlined in no uncertain terms that he had no problem blocking ‘Bogie’ from one picture if he didn’t star in the other.
During a phone call, the actor made himself clear: “I’m sorry, Jack. I just can’t do it. My stomach will not let me,” he said. “I am an honest man, and I have to be honest with myself in this manner. If you want to get tough with me, I will feel that I have lost a friend.” Naturally, Warner didn’t give a fuck.
It was a dick-measuring contest he refused to lose, with Warner telling Bogart that if he didn’t take top billing in Conflict, he would either stop Passage to Marseille in its tracks, suspend him from appearing in any Warner Bros movies until he relented, or hire a different actor to take his place.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Bogart reluctantly acquiesced and shot them back-to-back. Ironically, Passage to Marseille was released over a year before Conflict despite the shooting schedules being in close proximity, with a rights issue holding up the ladder for almost two years before it eventually hit cinemas in June 1945.
The film he actually wanted to make made more money at the box office and fared better among critics than the one he was blackmailed into making, which might have given him a small shred of comfort, with Warner using his position as one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures to get one of its most famous faces to do what he asked, regardless of whether they wanted to or not.
