No other star of Hollywood's golden age continues to hold audiences in quite the way that Humphrey Bogart does. The American Film Institute voted him the greatest male star of all time and his influence as cultural icon and representative of a certain distinctively American masculinity and noir cool is greater now than ever, half a century after his death. He has not lacked for able biographers — there appear to be about 40, including the definitive 1997 volume by A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax