“This rotten movie”: the one role Humphrey Bogart always regretted playing
Every actor who goes on to become a major star has at least one cinematic skeleton in their closet, and for Humphrey Bogart, it was a movie that exists in direct opposition to everything that made him one of the golden age of Hollywood’s most effortlessly cool and charismatic leading men.
Think of anyone from the era who became indelibly woven into the fabric of American cinema, and chances are high that there was at least one early performance they regretted for the rest of their days. John Wayne played a dead body and a singing cowboy, Cary Grant toiled in thankless pre-Code dramas, and Gary Cooper started off as an extra and stuntman, to name but three.
Then there’s Bogart, who spent the better chunk of a decade restricted to bit parts and supporting roles until he found his turning point in the 1940s, after which he shot into the stratosphere. John Huston’s noir masterpiece The Maltese Falcon was the turnstile that granted him a smooth slide into a slew of iconic appearances across genres, such as romance in Casablanca and To Have and Have Not to more noir in The Big Sleep, and even a western with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, not to mention all the other titles in between. Understandably, he was cemented as an A-list superstar by the end of the decade.
Like most contract players, ‘Bogie’ already had dozens of credits to his name before he finally landed a big-screen breakthrough, and naturally, one of his final films prior to hitting it big was one he’d rather not be associated with. He notched seven credits in 1939 alone, but The Return of Doctor X was an outlier.
In fact, the actor made 75 features between his debut in 1930’s A Devil with Woman and his swansong in 1956’s The Harder They Fall, and director Vincent Sherman’s decidedly B-tier genre flick was the only one that occupied science-fiction and/or horror territory, and it’s no surprise it was a one-time thing.
Taking third billing behind Wayne Morris and Rosemary Lane, despite playing the title character, Dr Maurice Xavier, Bogart hammed it up as a deranged killer who hunts his victims based on their blood type, murdering them to steal their valuable plasma in order to keep himself alive, having been brought back from the dead.
It’s completely unlike anything he made before or after, and it was enough to instantly make The Return of Doctor X his most hated film: “This is one of the pictures that made me march to Jack Warner and ask for more money again,” he said, noting, “You can’t believe what this one was like. I had a part that somebody like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff should have played.”
Still, Bogart managed to find the funny side to all this, poking fun at the movie’s plot while voicing his dismay. “The only thing that nourished this poor bastard was blood,” he continued. “If it had been Jack Warner’s blood, maybe I wouldn’t have minded as much. The trouble was, they were drinking mine, and I was making this rotten movie.”
Needless to say, a sci-fi-tinged horror and Bogart didn’t make suitable bedfellows, and after The Return of Doctor X, he spent the rest of his career staying as far away from the genre as possible.
