TCM Star of the Month September 2022: Humphrey Bogart

Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (airing Sept. 22, 10:15 PM)

Now that Summer Under the Stars is over for another year, we're back to TCM's regular programming. The first thing we get on September 1 is a new Star of the Month. This time around, that star is Humphrey Bogart, who was also Star of the Month back in December 2009, since I did a post on that. Bogart's movies will be airing every Thursday in prime time, into the morning hours on Fridays. Bogart, being under contract at Warner Bros. for a lot of his career, has a lot of movies available for TCM to select from fairly easily, and a lot of them show up this month.

One of Bogart's most famous roles is in Casablanca, but that doesn't show up until the fourth night of the salute. He was also married to Lauren Bacall and made four movies with her, so you'd think that would be a good way to kick off one of the nights of programming. Indeed, we get all four of those movies together, but it starts off overnight tonight, or early tomorrow morning, at 4:00 AM, with Key Largo.

Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, Sept. 2 at 8:00 AM

The Maltese Falcon is generally considered the movie that really made Bogart a star, coming on the heels of High Sierra (Sept. 9, 12:45 PM), so you'd think The Maltese Falcon would be another good choice to kick the whole thing off, or at least one of the nights. But it shows up at 10:00 tonight. In fact, the movie that kicks everything off is the one that won Bogart his Oscar, The African Queen. I didn't have a picture of it on my hard drive, and didn't really have the time to look for one to post here, which is why that's not the movie at the top of this post.

I did have a photo from The Petrified Forest (pictured above), which probably should have made Bogart a star. Amazingly, he'd have to toil in supporting roles, such as the stable boy in Dark Victory (Sept. 23 at 12:15 AM, or still the evening of Sept. 22 in more westerly time zones; and no, I don't have a photo of that either), or decided B stuff like The Return of Dr. X, pictured at left; that one comes on at 4:30 AM on Sept. 9.

The Return of Dr. X was released in 1939, one of several Bogart movies from that year, along with the James Cagney western The Oklahoma Kid, the aforementioned Dark Victory, The Roaring Twenties (Sept. 16 at 6:00 AM), and You Can't Get Away With Murder (Sept. 30, 7:15 AM). That last one gets mentioned in a Bogart movie that was new to me when it aired in August for William Holden's day in Summer Under the Stars: Invisible Stripes (Sept. 30, 4:30 AM). I'll be doing a review of Invisible Stripes at the end of the month. Suffice it to say that in the movie, the characters go to a movie theatre that has a poster of You Can't Get Away With Murder, and I looked it up to see if it was a real movie. Imagine my surprise to see that it was a Humphrey Bogart movie.