Humphrey Bogart in "Watch on the Rhine". The film vaulted Bogart from fourth place to first in the studio's roster, finally overtaking James Cagney. By 1946 he'd more than doubled his annual salary to over $460,000, making him the highest-paid actor in the world. Between 1943 and 1944, Bogart went on the United Service Organizations and War Bond tours accompanied by Methot, enduring arduous travels to Italy and North Africa, including Casablanca. Bogart met Lauren Bacall while filming "To Have and Have Not" (1944), a loose adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel. The movie has many similarities with "Casablanca"—the same enemies, the
Humphrey Bogart of the play, "a peach ... a roaring Western melodrama ... Humphrey Bogart does the best work of his career as an actor." Bogart said that the play "marked my deliverance from the ranks of the sleek, sybaritic, stiff-shirted, swallow-tailed 'smoothies' to which I seemed condemned to life." This, however, did not yet mean felt secure. Warner Bros. bought the screen rights to "The Petrified Forest". The play seemed perfect for the studio, which was famous for its socially realistic, urban, low-budget action pictures, especially for a public entranced by real-life criminals like John Dillinger (whom Bogart resembled) and Dutch