(See Cover) When he advances, greasy with makeup, to his daily toil, a motion-picture actor is engulfed—profile, esthetic sensibilities and nervous stomach—in an atmosphere depressingly reminiscent of a submarine dockyard. The sound stage in which he works is as cavernous and gloomy as a wharfside warehouse. The day's set, thrown up in a distant corner as if to dramatize the phoniness and gullibility of man, is bathed in a glare of blue-white light as blinding as that from an arc welder's torch. Half a hundred hairy union men tinker stolidly with furniture, electrical cables, fuse boxes and cranes, or peer down in boredom from steel bridgework overhead. Half a hundred tourists stand in the outer shadows, looking as if their shoes pinched. Everybody talks.
The actor waits. He is essentially a gear —no matter how large and important a gear—presently to be inserted into the mechanism of moviemaking, and delay is his lot in life. He is called to walk through his part—while the babble of voices goes steadily on—and is dismissed to wait some more. He is called back to pose and turn while a man with a light meter goes over him like some latter-day Holmes peering through a magnifying glass. He is cornered by a harried female in slacks, who stares at him in distaste and pats his nose with a powder puff.
But eventually his moment comes. An assistant director with a voice like a backfield coach bawls: "Keep it quiet now, boys. Quiet. Quiet, if you please!" A gong bangs with doomlike clangor. A horrid silence falls. "Speed," mutters the man in the bucket seat of the huge Mitchell camera, peering through its eyepieces as if appalled. Then, while the 50 hairy ones look on in a sort of belligerent despair, while the tourists stand on tiptoes, while the director and servitors of the camera lean close enough to breathe on him, the actor kneels beside a chaise longue in the awful light, takes the hand of a beautiful, sticky-faced woman reclining there, and says, striving for both articulation and tenderness, "Darling . . ."
Confidence & Command. It is a type of human endeavor that calls for a soul well stiffened with ego. It calls for poise, concentration, vitality and, above all, for a kind of instinctive communion with the camera that comes partly from inner fiber, partly from vicissitude and long practice. Few possess these attributes in such full measure as that seamy, balding and corrosively sardonic old professional, Humphrey DeForest Bogart, soon to be seen as Captain Queeg in Stanley Kramer's heralded Technicolor version of The Caine Mutiny.
In the process of making 68 motion pictures, some wonderfully good, some indifferent and some terrible, Bogart has acquired a brassy air of confidence and command. There is a look of real kingliness about him as he stands, painted, costumed and toupeed ("The rug, old boy, the rug"), barking like a strangled seal to warm up his pipes before a tender scene. Veteran Director Michael Curtiz remembers with rueful admiration how Bogie, in the midst of a long, dramatic speech that would have had many an actor sweating with nerves, snarled, during a moment out of mike range, "God, I'm hungry."