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Robinson had always had top billing over Bogart in their previous films together but for this movie, Robinson's name appears to the right of Bogart's, but placed a little higher on the posters, and also in the film's opening credits, to indicate Robinson's near-equal status. Robinson's image was also markedly larger and centered on the original poster, with Bogart relegated to the background. In the film's trailer, Bogart is repeatedly mentioned first but Robinson's name is listed above Bogart's in a cast list at the trailer's very end.

Robinson's role remains similar in circumstance to Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), Bogart's initial breakthrough which the studio had originally earmarked for Robinson. Bogart filed for divorce from Methot in February 1945. He and Bacall married in a small ceremony at the country home of Bogart's close friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, at Malabar Farm near Lucas, Ohio on May 21, 1945.

Bogart and Bacall moved into a $160,000 (equal to $2,065,508 today) white brick mansion in an exclusive neighborhood in Holmby Hills. The marriage proved to be a happy one, though there were the normal tensions due to their differences. He was a homebody and she liked nightlife; he loved the sea, which made her seasick.

81 Bogart's drinking sometimes inflamed tensions. Bogart became a father at age 49 when Bacall gave birth to Stephen (Steve) Humphrey Bogart on January 6, 1949, during the filming of Tokyo Joe. Bogart told Tokyo Joe's screenwriter, Steve Fisher, "Don’t get any stupid ideas.

It just happens to fit."83 Stephen was actually named after Bogart's character's nickname in To Have and Have Not. 84 Stephen would go on to become an author and biographer, later hosting a television special about his father on Turner Classic Movies. Their daughter, Leslie Howard Bogart, was born on August 23, 1952 and named after British actor Leslie Howard, his co-star in The Petrified Forest.

The enormous success of Casablanca redefined Bogart's career. For the first time, Bogart could be cast successfully as a tough, strong man and, at the same time, as a vulnerable love interest. Despite Bogart's elevated standing, he did not yet have a contractual right of script refusal, so when he got weak scripts, he dug in his heels, and locked horns again with the front office, as he did on the film Conflict (1945).

85 Though he submitted to Jack Warner on that picture, he successfully turned down God is My Co-Pilot (1945). Riding high in 1947 with a new contract which provided some script refusal rights and the right to form his own separate production company, Bogart reunited with John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a stark tale of greed involving three gold prospectors played out in the dusty back country of Mexico. Absent any love story or a happy ending, it was deemed a risky project.

87 Bogart later said of co-star (and John Huston's father) Walter Huston, "He's probably the only performer in Hollywood to whom I'd gladly lost a scene". The film was grueling to make, and was done in summer for greater realism and atmosphere. 89 James Agee wrote, "Bogart does a wonderful job with this character...miles ahead of the very good work he has done before".

John Huston won the Academy Award for direction and screenplay and his father won Best Supporting Actor, but the film had mediocre box office results. Bogart complained, "An intelligent script, beautifully directed—something different—and the public turned a cold shoulder on it". Bogart, a liberal Democrat,91 organized a delegation to Washington, D.C., called the Committee for the First Amendment, against the House Un-American Activities Committee's harassment of Hollywood screenwriters and actors.

He subsequently wrote an article "I'm No Communist" in the March 1948 edition of Photoplay magazine in which he distanced himself from The Hollywood Ten to counter the negative publicity that resulted from his appearance. In addition to being offered better, more diverse roles, in 1948 he started his own production company, Santana Productions, named after his private sailing yacht.