Robert E. Sherwood remained a close friend of Bogart's. In
1936, the film version of
The Petrified Forest came out. Bogart got excellent reviews, but he was then
typecast as a gangster in a series of crime dramas for Warner Bros. All told, Bogart went to the electric chair 12 times, and was sentenced to over 800 years of hard labor.
Jack Warner saw nothing wrong with that; as long as the movies made money, and the actors got paid, he saw no reason for anyone to complain.
Mary Philips refused to give up her Broadway career to come to Hollywood with Bogart, and soon they were divorced.
On
August 21,
1938, Bogart entered into a disastrous third marriage, with
Mayo Methot, a lively, friendly woman when sober, but a paranoid when drunk. She was convinced that her husband was cheating on her. The more she and Bogart drifted apart, the more she drank, got furious and threw things at him: plants, crockery, anything close at hand. Bogart sometimes returned fire, and the press dubbed them "the Battling Bogarts." "The Bogart-Methot marriage was the sequel to the
Civil War," said their friend
Julius Epstein. A wag observed that there was madness in his Methot. During this time, Bogart bought a sailboat, which he named "Sluggy" after his hot-tempered wife.
In
1938, Warner Bros. put him in a "
hillbilly musical" called
Swing Your Lady as a wrestling promoter; he later apparently considered this his worst film performance. In
1939, Bogart played a mad scientist in
The Return of Doctor X. He cracked: "If it'd been
Jack Warner's blood…I wouldn't have minded so much. The trouble was they were drinking mine and I was making this stinking movie."
The studio system, then in its heyday, largely restricted actors to one studio, and Warner Bros. had no interest in making Bogart a star. Shooting on a new movie might begin days or only hours after shooting on the previous one was completed. Any actor who refused a role could be suspended without pay. Bogart didn't like the roles chosen for him, but he worked steadily: between
1936 and
1940, Bogart averaged a movie every two months. He thought that Warner Bros.' wardrobe department was cheap, and often wore his own suits in his movies. In
High Sierra, Bogart used his own mutt to play his character's dog "Pard."
The leading men ahead of Bogart at Warner Bros. included not just such classic stars as
James Cagney and
Edward G. Robinson, but also actors far less well-known today, such as
Victor McLaglen,
George Raft and
Paul Muni. Most of the studio's better movie scripts went to these men, and Bogart had to take what was left. He made films like
Racket Busters,
San Quentin, and
You Can't Get Away With Murder. The only substantial leading role he got during this period was in
Samuel Goldwyn's
Dead End (1937), but he played a variety of interesting supporting roles, such as
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) (in which he got shot by James Cagney). Bogart was gunned down on film repeatedly, by Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, among others; he rarely saw his own films and didn't attend the premieres.
Bogart had been raised to believe that acting was beneath a gentleman. Acting in movies was even worse than on the stage, and playing depraved gunmen in "B" pictures for Warner Bros. was not something to be mentioned in polite company.
In California in the 1930s, Bogart bought a 55-foot sailing yacht from
Dick Powell. The sea was his sanctuary. He was a serious sailor, respected by other sailors who had seen too many Hollywood actors and their boats. About 30 weekends a year, he went out on his boat. He once said: "An actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to nail down what he really is, not what he is currently pretending to be."
He had a lifelong disgust for the pretentious, fake or phony, as his son Stephen told
Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne in 1999. Sensitive yet caustic, and disgusted by the inferior movies he was churning out, Bogart cultivated the persona of a soured idealist, a man exiled from better things in New York, living by his wits, drinking too much, cursed to live out his life among second-rate people and projects.
When he thought an actor, director or a movie studio had done something shoddy, he spoke up about it and was willing to be quoted. The Hollywood press, unaccustomed to candor, was delighted. Bogart once said, "All over Hollywood, they are continually advising me 'Oh, you mustn't say that. That will get you in a lot of trouble' when I remark that some picture or writer or director or producer is no good. I don't get it. If he isn't any good, why can't you say so? If more people would mention it, pretty soon it might start having some effect."