Apropos of yesterday’s post which showed us Bogart as a working actor meticulously and professionally going through a series of wardrobe tests, here’s another example of Bogart out of character (more or less) as he blows his lines during takes. While blooper reels are fairly low hanging fruit in terms of the amusement factor, I find this collection of Bogie’s screw-ups quite revealing. Bogie was a stage-trained actor and, as a commentor on this blog pointed out yesterday, he apparently learned the entire script before shooting began rather than just going scene by scene as the film’s shooting progressed. (The commentor–okay, he’s actually a dear old friend of mine–points out that you can see Bogie’s lips moving during the costume tests which indicates that he was probably reading lines from the scenes that corresponded with the costumes). Most stage-trained actors pride themselves on getting scripts word-perfect–they have a reverence for the writers explicit instructions and meanings that many film-only actors don’t necessarily have, instead often preferring to wing the scene a little and paraphrase and rewrite lines. What you’ll see in this reel is that most of the time when Bogie messes up he doesn’t laugh. In fact he gets seriously pissed at himself . ‘Goddamit!’ he exclaims with vehement self-disgust at himself, for committing what to him must have been an actor’s cardinal sin: not being prepared. Any well trained stage actor knows that their first responsibility is to the words and their memorization. It’s like a pianist forgetting their scales–it renders you a non-pianist. Bogie’s seemingly effortless suave came at a high cost–this is an actor who worked himself hard, who held himself to very high standards. Oh by the way, note that when the bloopers occur you sometimes hear either a boxing match bell ring or a horn honk. This appears to have been an on-set joke–somebody stood by (probably the prop guy) waiting to ‘give ’em the bird’, probably as a way to lessen the tensions that must have been built up during the days of six day weeks and fifteen hour days…