Like Bogart, Sacchi was born and bred in New York City. Unlike Bogart, Sacchi is a college boy with a Master’s from New York University, “as well as one from the streets of New York,” he said in the author introduction to a boxing book he wrote in the 1970s with former flyweight champ Willie Pep, Willie Pep Remembers…Friday Night Heroes (the book was reissued in paperback in 2007).

“I went to college to act in the late ’60s when Bogart was having a resurgence with the college kids,” said Sacchi, who was born in 1941, Bogart’s breakout year from the Warner Bros. pack with four movies released, including High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon.

“Being in New York, the hub of advertising, they developed a Bogart character for commercials. They thought I looked like Bogart and I was getting commercials. For an actor, that keeps you alive.”

Sacchi has taken his Bogart around the world. A few years back he was hired by Unisys for a corporate gathering of the company’s top employees. The theme was leadership.

“Bogart had leadership, right,” Sacchi said. “They had it in Marrakesh, about 100 miles north of Casablanca. I was emceeing it with the president, Joe McGrath (he has since stepped down). The guest speaker that night was Gorbachev. He looked at me and said, ‘Ah, Casablanca.’ Everyone knows.”

Sacchi’s Bogart was featured on a recurring segment on Entertainment Tonight called Hollywood’s Unsolved Murders, in which Sacchi/Bogart narrated events surrounding deaths such as the suspicious 1959 death of George Reeve, TV’s Superman (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHdCK7l4Nv4&NR=1). Sacchi also made a 1982 rap record as a trenchcoated Bogie, “The Jungle Queen” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jKCRuI5ids).

No, that is not Sacchi portraying Bogart in Woody Allen’s 1972 Play It Again, Sam. That role was played by Dark Shadows and other daytime soaps star Jerry Lacy.

Sacchi’s bright, shining film moment came in 1980 when he starred in The Man With Bogart’s Face, a great spoof of the film noir shamus flick that Bogart etched forever in our minds with his portrayals of two literary private dicks – Sam Spade in John Huston’s 1941 film version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawk’s 1946 film version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

“He goes into the private eye business to emulate the old-time gumshoes,” Sacchi said of his Sam Marlowe character.

The film opens with Sam Marlowe’s bandages being removed after plastic surgery to make him look like Bogart (a nod to the 1947 Bogart/Bacall film Dark Passage). He drives a smog-producing 1940s car, wears a trenchcoat and a cocked trilby in the hot L.A. weather and deals with an assortment of characters based on the ensemble actors Bogie was teamed with in the 1940s Warner Bros. movies that made his odd name a household word.

Robert Osborne, 14 years before becoming host of the Turner Classic Movie channel where Bogart is to be honored this month, has a cameo role as a reporter with one line in The Man With Bogart’s Face. There may be as many in-jokes and film nerd references in it than the better known Carl Reiner/Steve Martin gumshoe spoof Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.

“The casting director tried to get everybody who ever did a picture with Bogart,” Sacchi said. “He got George Raft. That was his last part. He was a big star and Bogart wasn’t when they did several pictures together, Invisible Stripes and They Drive By Night.”

(Bogart fans have the largely forgotten George Raft to thank for turning down a few key roles that went to Bogie. Sam Spade was one of those. Raft said he was too big a star to work with first-time director John Huston. Thank you, George, wherever you are.)

Sacchi has had other roles over the years, but being Bogart paid the bills, and he continues to portray Bogart into the 21^st century.

“I was and still am the biggest publicity agent for Humphrey Bogart,” Sacchi said. “If nobody emulates you, people forget. People still know Bogart, but his popularity does seem to run in cycles.”

But he adds there is a terrible cost to being so closely associated with a single actor.

“Yeah, I was able to make a living. Not really what I wanted to do,” he said. “But I was trying to be Bogart and that’s the penalty you get, losing different parts. There are many times I lost parts. Someone will say, ‘I can’t use you. You look too much like Bogart.’”

Funny thing is, Sacchi was never a big Bogie fan.

“I’d seen some movies,” he said. “Since I had to do it to make a buck, I had to get into it and watch the pictures.”

He soon became an expert on Bogart, especially in the 1980s with his Broadway show Bogart and his Four Wives, which was directed by prolific television and film director Ted Post (Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone, Magnum Force, Go Tell the Spartans).

“We did a lot of work for that, a lot of research on his four marriages. We went through newspaper morgues,” Sacchi said.

Asked to name his favorite Bogart film, Sacchi goes for an odd and intriguing entry, another of Bogart’s 1941 releases, All Through the Night, which marked Bogart’s first match-up with Nazi’s, this time in the form of Conrad Veidt (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) who leads a team of Fifth Column terrorists in Hew York City.

“There’s a little comedy in it,” Sacchi said. “It’s New York during the second world war. Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers were in it. Conrad Veidt. Good actor. It’s a good film.”

The Man with Bogart’s Face is available from Netflix. You can also see a trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AP13CaJu0g&feature=related.

There’s also a funny introductory clip of Sacchi as Bogie on his website, robertsacchi.com.