Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor as the treacherous female foil. Bogart's sharp timing and facial expressions were praised by the cast and director as vital to the quick action and rapid-fire dialogue. The film was a huge hit in theaters and a major triumph for Huston. Bogart was unusually happy with it, remarking, "it is practically a masterpiece. I don't have many things I'm proud of ... but that's one". Bogart gained his first real romantic lead in 1942's "Casablanca", playing Rick Blaine, a hard-pressed expatriate nightclub owner hiding from a shady past while negotiating a fine line among Nazis, the French
Humphrey Bogart three Academy Awards. After his death, a "Bogie Cult" formed at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York, and in France, which contributed to his spike in popularity in the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1997, "Entertainment Weekly" magazine named Bogart the number one movie legend of all time. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him the greatest male screen legend. Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" (1960) was the first film to pay tribute to Bogart. Later, in Woody Allen's comic paean to Bogart, "Play It Again, Sam" (1972), Bogart's ghost comes to the