12 Favorite Humphrey Bogart/Marilyn Monroe Performances

This is a two-hour meditation on the greed within man's soul, and how that greed will drive them to do dark deeds. Humphrey Bogart gave the performance of his career, and, in typical fashion, wasn't even nomination for the Best Actor Oscar. Such a shame because he goes from sane, but desperate, work in Mexico to King Lear style paranoia and mania. Walter Huston also gives a great performance as the often imitated crusty, slightly crazy old prospector. And in case you ever wonder where the exchange about not needing no stinking badges came from, look no further. There's a scene late in the movie that doesn't last long, but features Huston's character living a tropical island fantasy life...in Mexico's countryside? It looks like it crept in from another movie, and is also highly inaccurate to where the story takes place in Mexico (hint: mountain ranges).

John Huston did something rare with a book-to-film adaptation, he just filmed Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled prose. Humphrey Bogart slips effortlessly into the role of dead-on-the-inside detective Sam Spade. Honestly, what kind of a hero is Sam Spade? He beats up Cairo cause he's gay, double crosses everyone, sleeps with his partner's wife, doesn't care that his partner got killed, and sends the woman he loves to jail. The sardonic outlook on life feels fresh to today's audience, but had to have been shocking at the time. Films in the forties were never really this cynical. There was usually a happy ending somewhere in sight, or the bad guys got what they deserved. Here, while the MacGuffin turns out to be a fake, that doesn't resolve the storyline. The bad guys are still going to go look for it, and all of the characters remain as deadly, cynical, and sardonic as they were in the beginning. Spade soul can practically be heard being sucked down to hell at the film's end. It's dark, it's one of the first noir films, it launched several careers, and it pushed the boundaries during a highly conservative time. I thank everyone involved for doing so.

The most hilarious and subversive film ever made about a one-joke premise: sex. That is honestly all that the movie is about. Sure there's a tiny subplot about gangsters and the Valentine's Day Massacre, but its mostly all about different forms of sexual identity. There are hints of transvestitism, lesbianism, homosexuality, and identity confusion. Jack Lemmon is at the heights of his maniac, unaware, totally hapless comedic skills as Jerry/Daphne, the (un)lucky recipient of an eccentric millionaire's affections and on the receiving end of one huge identity crisis. But is Marilyn Monroe breathlessly singing "I Wanna Be Loved By You," and perfecting her ditzy blonde routine to a fine comedic polish that makes the film so beloved. It's a shame this role didn't get her more love from the Hollywood establishment. A Golden Globe really isn't enough of an award for one of the great comedic performances from one of the greatest stars of all-time.

What more can really be said about Casablanca? Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman have a wonderful chemistry, a complicated and believable on-screen relationship, and get the ending that they deserve, which also never feels contrived or forced. Peter Lorre, Claude Reins, and Sydney Greenstreet deliver their typically strong supporting performances. They were, after-all, stock players at Warner Brothers and usually given these kinds of roles. Lorre is my favorite of the bunch though, he always delivers some oddball and strange performance -- somewhere between quirky ticks and a feeling of improve. But Humphrey Bogart is my favorite actor of all time, and this is one of his quintessential performances. This is where he transitioned from playing pure cynics with questionable morals to romantic heroes who hid behind their cynicism. He might pay off the local government, pretend to play several angles, but, in the end, he does what is right and shows his big heart.

Raymond Chandler's infamous novel gets the big screen treatment and a Hollywood movie star re-visioning. The film was famously re-edited to remove Martha Vickers and include more of Lauren Bacall. Why? Because Bogie and Bacall had a chemistry that could only be described as magical, it clicked on screen and off. Oh, that and Martha Vickers was delivering a performance that overshadowed the bigger star. While it might be totally accurate to the novel, it's still entertaining on its own merits and close enough to the text's tone and character motivations to be a great adaptation. For me, Bogart is the perfect film noir detective -- sad, wise, funny, cynical, and secretly very emotional. He uses all of these attributes in this film and The Maltese Falcon to iconic effects.

A melancholy meditation on the death of the "Old Western" lifestyle in which Monroe portrays a variant of herself and finds variations of her three husbands. Since she was married to Arthur Miller at the time, she wound up with Clark Gable instead of the man that truly loved her in her lifetime Joe DiMaggio (here represented by a fantastic Montgomery Clift). Gable delivers the best performance of his career, the scene where he drunkenly imagines his children visiting him is heartbreaking. The scenes with the mustang at the end drive the point home -- these people are misfits in the new society, and might be slightly doomed. Monroe, Gable, Clift and Thelma Ritter all died shortly after completing it which gives the film's last lines some true weight in hindsight.

Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe play a pair of bosom buddies (bad pun alert!) who embark on a transatlantic cruise and sing and dance along the way. Russell plays Dorothy Shaw, the brainier, bustier, wittier, and less blonde of the pair. She delivers a lot of the best one liners in the film and sings a few of the better songs. Monroe plays Lorelei Lee, the titular blonde, and by the time we get around to her performance of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,"� you can practically hear Monroe's iconoclast status being written and her visage being emblazoned upon merchandise. It's a breezy musical that's colorful and all sorts of fun.