Dark Passage; High Sierra; They Drive by Night;To Have and Have Not

These four films from the most productive decade of Humphrey Bogart’s career might be second-tier in the Bogie canon, but only because pretty much anything is second-tier to Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. Included here are two of the last films of his pre-leading-man days when he was still playing villains and supporting charactersÑthe gritty noirs High Sierra and They Drive by Night, directed by the sometimes workmanlike Raoul Walsh near the top of his form. 1944’s To Have and Have Not, the legend goes, was the result of a bar bet between Ernest Hemingway and director Howard Hawks. Papa claimed Hawks couldn’t make a good film from his worst novel; Hawks got William Faulkner to write the script and won the bet. The weirdest one here is the 1947 thriller Dark Passage, in which Bogie’s wrongfully accused fugitive gets plastic surgery to hide himself while tracking down his wife’s killer-and for the first hour, while the bandages are on, the film is told entirely through a Bogart’s-eye camera view. Gimmicky, yes, but it gives new meaning to “Here’s looking at you, kid.”