In the new documentary “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes,” the late actor himself does most of the talking. “Acting is a nice racket,” he says. “The words ‘movie star’ are so misused they have no meaning. The studios can make anyone a star if they get behind them. That’s why I don’t kid myself, why I can’t take myself or the business seriously.”
Born 125 years ago this December, the “Casablanca” star remains one of the most recognizable icons of the silver screen. Those careworn features full of irony and pathos, that ever-present trenchcoat and fedora, are as familiar as Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate or Audrey Hepburn clutching a cigarette holder. But when director Kathryn Ferguson was approached to make a feature-length documentary about his life, she knew she wanted to get behind the actor’s movie star façade.
Made with the cooperation of the Humphrey Bogart Estate and the actor’s son, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, “Life Comes in Flashes” focuses on Bogart’s relationships with the five women in his life — his mother and four wives. Ferguson, who directed the 2022 BIFA-winning Sinéad O’Connor documentary “Nothing Compares,” opted for a similarly immersive approach to Bogart’s life.
Without being able to interview the subject himself or having a treasure trove of recordings like the ones left behind by Marlon Brando used in “Listen to Me Marlon,” Ferguson and her producer and co-writer Eleanor Emptage and editor Mick Mahon had to comb through countless hours of footage to construct a narrative.
“It was a humongous task in every respect,” Ferguson told IndieWire. “The archive itself was extensive, but I think a really big part of it too was trying to mine the words — getting all of the words so that we could turn them into a script […] and bring Bogart’s voice to life so that he can tell his own story.” Voiced by Kerry Shale, those words offer a wry, self-deprecating, and sometimes surprisingly warm insight into the actor’s inner life.
“I’m not at ease with women, really,” he claims at one point. “I must obviously like certain women — I’ve certainly married enough of them. If you’re not married or in love, you’re on the loose, and that’s not comfortable. Love is the one emotion that can relieve, as much as is ever possible, the awful, essential loneliness of us all.”
Focusing on Bogart’s romantic relationships is a compelling way to frame his story, especially since the actor was a self-professed loner with a tendency toward nihilism. (See “In a Lonely Place” if ever you needed confirmation of that.)
The film explores in depth the push and pull between his individualism and his attraction to dazzling women, from his chilly relationship with his mother Maud and early marriages to theater actresses Helen Menken and Mary Phillips to his tempestuous relationship with former child star Mayo Methot and final, mythical romance with co-star Lauren Bacall before he died of esophageal cancer at 57.
Maud Humphrey was one of the most sought-after illustrators in the country at the turn of the century, famous for her paintings of plump-cheeked babies often modeled after her infant son. In addition to being the breadwinner of the family (her $50,000 a year surpassed her husband’s salary as an eminent New York surgeon), she was a prominent suffragette, often found marching through the streets of Manhattan holding a placard.
As the movie illustrates, however, Bogart had a distant relationship with her. “She was Maud, never Mother,” he says at one point.
“He obviously felt that there was a real lack of nurture there,” Ferguson said, “And it’s this lack of nurture, and maybe this mother wound, we’d say — similar, I suppose, in Sinéad’s story – that was interesting to us as female filmmakers.”
The lack of tenderness in this early relationship informed the rest of Bogart’s life, but what he wanted and who he chose to marry often seemed at odds.
“He was very drawn to these very successful, talented women, but I think he really wanted to be nurtured, and he wanted each of these women to potentially — not give up their careers, but certainly put theirs to one side so that they could support him,” Ferguson said.
Bogart’s first marriage was to Helen Menken, a theater actress in New York who was significantly more successful than he was when they married in 1926. A year later, she was arrested for starring in “The Captive,” a play about a lesbian romance that scandalized New York. Like Maud, Menken pushed boundaries, and Bogart was supportive of her even as his own career floundered.
The couple divorced within a year, and he went on to marry actress Mary Phillips. They were together for nearly a decade, spanning the Great Depression and Bogart’s move from Broadway to Hollywood. But they were apart much of the time as she pursued her own career on the stage. When he finally found steady employment in movies, she decided to return to Broadway, later explaining, “I had grown accustomed to seeing my name in lights.”
One of the most in-depth sections of the film centers on Bogart’s third marriage to Mayo Methot, a child star who became a feisty supporting character actress in the early 1930s. Fueled by alcohol, their fights and reconciliations were a reliable source of fodder for gossip columnists who gleefully dubbed them “The Battling Bogarts.” But as Ferguson and her team highlight, Methot was an integral part of Bogart’s ascension to the Hollywood A-list and a victim of the industry’s habit of casting forthright women as villains — both in movies and real life.
In several moments where Bogart’s words are too deflective or sparse, Ferguson brings in the reflections of Louise Brooks, the silent film star who wrote razor-sharp observations late in life about the people in the industry whom she knew.
“Besides Leslie Howard [who had insisted that Bogart was given his star-making role in ‘The Petrified Forest’], no other person contributed so much to Humphrey’s success as his third wife, Mayo Methot,” Brooks is quoted as saying. “[H]e met Mayo, and she set fire to him. Those passions — envy, hatred and violence — which were essential to the Bogey character, which had been simmering beneath his failure for so many years, she brought to a boil, and blew the lid off all his inhibitions forever.”
Perhaps the most pivotal creative choice in the documentary is the score. Featuring the music of the trio Unloved, it offers a sinuous, swaggering, reverb-heavy soundscape that audiences might recognize from “Killing Eve.” “I suppose what we were really trying to be careful [about] overall was this not to feel massively nostalgic and left in a time,” Ferguson said, explaining that she had wanted to work with Unloved founder and fellow Belfast native David Holmes for years. “Literally, we were given the stems for every single song across the four Unloved albums,” she said, “And that’s how Mick constructed this incredible score.”
The power of the score is most evident in the first and final scenes of the film, where grainy, black-and-white footage of Bogart’s 1957 funeral is cut together to the rhythm of a haunting refrain from the band. The music creates an immersive, hypnotic entry into the day. The expressions of unadulterated grief on the familiar faces of Hollywood royalty add to the heft of these scenes, offering a rare glimpse into raw emotion at a time when everything from names to relationships was invented and packaged by the studios.
For Bogart and Bacall’s son, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, the film isn’t so much about finding an “aha moment” that unlocks something new about his father, but about showing “the totality of a man from a unique perspective.”
“[W]e all know about the incredible films he made, and that was how the public perceived him,” Stephen Bogart told IndieWire. “But that’s been done. Now, with Kathryn Ferguson’s masterful vision, we have a wholly different and deeper insight.”
His father was a loner, he acknowledges. His favorite pastimes were playing chess, sailing, and reading. Acting was the perfect profession for someone like him. “When you’re at your job ,you, of course, can’t be yourself,” Stephen Bogart said. “[T]here’s no revealing the real you, so no one really understands you.”
The exception, of course, was with the few people around him who helped remove that “essential loneliness” that he’d carried from childhood. As the funeral scenes so poignantly illustrate, Bogart might have been a loner, but long before he became a cinematic icon of a bygone era, he was a beloved figure with a core group of devoted friends. By viewing Bogart through his closest relationships, we have the opportunity to see him in a new light, and recognize those who helped shape him.
“Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” premieres November 15 in theaters.
