Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes, Dan Seymour, documentaries, Eric Lax, Humphrey Bogart, Kathryn Ferguson, Laura Horak, movies, Pamela Hutchinson, reviews, Sharon Dwyer Buzard, Stephen Bogart, Thomas Doherty
January 1, 2025
by Carla Hay
“Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes”
Directed by Kathryn Ferguson
Culture Representation: The documentary film “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” features an all-white group of people (mostly through archival footage) discussing the life and career of legendary actor Humphrey Bogart.
Culture Clash: Humphrey Bogart was one of the biggest movie stars of his generation, but his personal life was plagued by alcohol abuse and troubled marriages that ended in divorce.
Culture Audience: “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Bogart and celebrity documentaries about 20th century movie stars.
Although the biographical documentary “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” was sanctioned by the family of Humphrey Bogart, the movie doesn’t shy away from his faults and failings. Having narration from an actor portraying Bogart will get mixed reactions. The narration mostly comes from Bogart’s own words about his life. Some viewers will think that the narration is an annoying distraction, other viewers will like the narration’s self-effacing tone, and other viewers will be indifferent.
Directed by Kathryn Ferguson, “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” was written by Ferguson and Eleanor Emptage, a producer of the documentary. “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” consists mostly of archival footage, but there are a few interviews that were done exclusively for this documentary. Canadian actor Kerry Shale is the voice of Bogart for the movie’s narration and does a passable voice imitation.
Bogart was born in New York City on December 25, 1899. He died of esophageal cancer in Los Angeles on January 14, 1957. “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” (which is told mostly in chronological order) begins wth archival news footage of people, many of whom were celebrities, arriving for Bogart’s funeral. Ronald Reagan, Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy and David Niven are among the celebrities seen in this footage.
Shale (as Bogart) says in the narration over this funeral footage: “Funny. I never considered myself particularly well-liked. I never really knew before how many friends I did have. Just as you can’t cheat your way through life, you have to be yourself, believe in yourself, play your hunches. I really can’t understand why actors can’t have human frailties like other people, why they can’t make the same mistakes, guess wrong, now and then.”
Of course, the Bogart speaking in this narration is a movie star from an era where film studios tightly controlled the images of actors and actresses. There were no tell-all confessional memoirs from stars at this time. There was no Internet where celebrities and the media could document the daily lives of celebrities, including unflattering information, damaging mistakes or career-changing scandals.
Through interviews and commentaries, “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” repeatedly mentions that Bogart was a series of contradictions. On screen, he had an image of being a “tough guy.” People who knew Bogart say that in real life, he was soft-spoken and almost shy—except when he was drunk (which apparently was often), when he could become mean-spirited and violent.
Ardent fans of Bogart probably won’t learn anything revealing about his life from watching this documentary. However, the movie does a fairly good job of explaining how Bogart’s troubled early life had a tremendous impact on how he was later as a famous actor. Bogart’s first on-screen roles were usually playing low-life criminals, which is in contrast to the privileged childhood that he had, growing up in an affluent household.
His father Belmont DeForest Bogart was a surgeon. Humphrey’s mother Maud was a famous illustrator who earned more money than Belmont at the height of her career. When Humphrey was a bay, his mother’s illustration of him was used in a Mellin’s Food ad. “It kind of gave me a complex,” the voiceover narration says of the unwanted attention he got from the ad. “I was always getting the razz [teasing] from friends.”
According to the documentary, Humphrey’s parents had a troubled marriage and frequently argued. Maud was also addicted to drugs and an aloof mother. The narration says of Maud: “She was totally incapable of showing affection.” It probably explains that Humphrey was reluctant to have kids of his own until his fourth and last wife—actress Lauren Bacall—changed his mind.
From an early age, Humphrey was a rebel. His father expected Humphrey to be a surgeon. Humphrey wanted to be an actor. Before his acting career began, Humphrey was expelled from school and later joined the U.S. Navy during World War I. “The war didn’t touch me mentally,” the narration says.
After getting out of the military, Humphrey struggled for years in the New York theater scene, where he usually had small supporting roles. His first wife Helen Menken, a theater actress whom he was married to from 1926 to 1927, was older and more famous than he was at the time. The documentary implies that he probably married her to help boost his career.
After getting divorced from Menken, he was married to actress Mary Philips from 1928 to 1937, during the years when Humphrey started doing roles in movies and relocated to Los Angeles. That marriage also ended in divorce, reportedly because time spent apart due to their work schedules. It was during this marriage that Humphrey got his breakthrough movie role in 1936’s “The Petrified Forest” because co-star Leslie Howard advocated for Humphrey to get this role.
By all accounts, Humphrey’s third marriage to actress Mayo Methot (they were married from 1938 to 1945) was his most volatile marriage, filled with breakups and makeups, until the marriage ended in divorce. Methot is described in the documentary as outspoken, bisexual and a great inspiration for Humphrey as an actor. But their relationship was plagued with the spouses’ alcohol addictions and violent physical abuse of each other. Methot’s mental health deteriorated and at one point, she was in a psychiatric facility.
It was during his marriage to Methot that Humphrey began to transition from roles as mostly criminals to heroic or romantic leading roles. He played private detective Sam Spade in 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon.” This transition included his most famous movie: 1942’s “Casablanca” (directed by Michael Curtiz), in which Humphrey starred as nightclub owner Rick Blaine, with Ingrid Bergman as Rick’s on-again/off-again lover Ilsa Lund. Even if people have never seen “Casablanca,” the movie’s most famous line is familiar to most people who know about pop culture: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Humphrey’s hard-drinking ways didn’t slow down during his marriage to Bacall, who says in archival interviews that she was able to keep up with his partying. The romance of the couple, who were affectonately known as Bogey and Bacall, began when they met while filming the 1944 romantic war movie “To Have and Have Not,” directed by Howard Hawks. At the time, Humphrey was 44, and Bacall was 19.
Hawks reportedly said to Humphrey about Bacall when the movie was being filmed: “Every scene we play, she’s going to leave you with egg on your face and walk out on you.” Humphreys supposedly responded: “She’s smarter than me.” Despite the big age gap between Bogey and Bacall, the couple had compatible interests, and she reportedly gave him a new lease on life after he had three failed marriages.
Bogey and Bacall had two children together: Stephen (born in 1949) and Leslie (born in 1952). In the narration, Humphrey says fatherhood was difficult for him, and it took him a while to learn how to be an attentive father. Stephen is one of the executive producers of “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” and provides commentary for the documentary but does not do the interviews on camera. Stephen says that when he was a child, he was always aware of his parents’ fame. Stephen says of his father: “It took him over 40 years to find his feet in his film career.”
Humprey’s other big movie successes included portraying detective Philip Marlowe in 1946’s “The Big Sleep”. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor, for his role as cranky steamboat captain Charlie Allnut in 1951’s “The African Queen,” directed by John Huston and co-starring Katharine Hepburn. “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” includes archival footage of Hepburn commenting on what it was like to work with Humphrey in “The African Queen.” “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” has details about Humphrey’s battles with Jack Warner, co-founder of Warner Bros. Pictures, because Humphrey didn’t like the control that the studio liked to have over performers’ lives.
People who appear on camera for documentary interviews include biographer Eric Lax, artist Sharon Dwyer Buzard, historian Laura Horak, film critic Pamela Hutchinson and historian Thomas Doherty. Other commentators, who say they were close to Humphrey and are now deceased, are heard in audio clips, although the documentary doesn’t identify when these interviews took place. These interviewees include actor/friend Dan Seymour, screenwriter/friend Peter Viertel, friend Patrick O’Moore, family friends Bob Schifer and Florence Schiffer.
“Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” falls short of giving a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes anecdotes about Humphrey’s most famous movies, possibly because those topics have already been thoroughly covered in several books about him. What’s most poignant about “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” are the descriptions of the last year of his life, when he was in ill health and could barely move. “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” is a slickly edited documentary about this complicated actor. However, the movie goes beyond the glitz and glamour to tell his story in a way that might not be complete but is still revealing enough about what he was like off-camera.
Freestyle Digital Media released “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” on November 15, 2024. The movie was released on digital and VOD on December 10, 2024.