This Fascinating Documentary Explores The Legacy Of Humphrey Bogart

By Olivia Cole

23 mins ago

Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes is out now

This post may contain affiliate links. Learn more

A new film helmed by Kathryn Ferguson, Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes, is the first feature documentary to chart the life and career of Hollywood icon Humphrey Bogart – narrated by the man himself using clips and interview archives. Is it worth a watch? Here’s Olivia Cole’s take.

Review: Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes

‘I’m not at ease with women really. 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 which can relieve, as much as is ever possible, the awful essential loneliness of us all…’ says Humphrey Bogart, seemingly talking directly to us in Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes, out now.

To hear his meditations on his four wives (and his mother) is a startlingly effective way into his life story, in a documentary guaranteed to increase your enjoyment of some of classic cinema’s greatest moments, whether that’s Casablanca (1942) opposite Ingrid Bergman or a noir fix with The Big Sleep (1946) opposite, of course, the fourth Mrs Bogart, Lauren Bacall.

Masheter Movie Archive / Alamy / Stock Photo

Whilst the films are indisputable classics of cinema and of cinema-inspired style, Irish director Kathryn Ferguson, who won the BFI & Chanel award for Creative Audacity in 2022, insists on a complex view of the man. Working with the Bogart family themselves could have potentially been uneasy baggage for any documentary maker. However, their approach chimed well. ‘After reading Stephen Bogart’s book, which I did before I presented the treatment, I could see that he also had a realistic view of his father, and was pretty nuanced about the whole thing,’ she recalls.

Ferguson and her producing partner Eleonor Emptage were able to interview Stephen and the couple’s daughter, Leslie, as well as to access the family’s cache of photography and determinedly un-starry home videos. They also drew on frank interviews with his friend and eventual biographer Joe Hyams (Hyams wrote the classic biography, though there are at least eight from which to choose, testament to the power of the Bogart and Bacall story).

It was an extraordinary collection of material to ‘mine’, she says. In fact, they wrote the script using entirely Bogart’s own words. ‘There was such a treasure trove of interviews and even recorded tapes of interviews. There’s so much out there, such a big archive of Bogart speaking, that we just thought: let’s see what we can do with these words. In lieu of having Bogart alive to do that, it was – how could we bring him back? – using his authentic words to do that.’

Alamy Stock Photo

Famously, the Bogarts left their toddler for six months to go and make African Queen with John Huston and Katharine Hepburn. Bogart, in particular, was very much of the era of children being patted on the head on the way through, even if that was sometimes passing through continents. Stephen’s most powerful memories are of being allowed to sail with him. He expresses the hopeful feeling that Bogart might have been able to get along better with him as he grew up, rather than as a very young child with whom he didn’t really know how to be. Bogart’s idea of quality time once involved carting his bored young son to his usual table at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills for a boozy lunch.

For perspective, Ferguson also thoughtfully explores the distant relationship Bogart had with his own mother, Maude Humphrey, an acclaimed magazine illustrator and busy suffragette, who had very little presence in his life. Part of a privileged New York family, he was born on Christmas Day 1899 (memorably grumbling he didn’t even get his own birthday). Ferguson brings into sharp focus the almost Victorian desolation of his patrician upbringing, so at odds with his tough guy movie persona. Ingrid Bergman recalled feeling as though she was starring opposite a man locked away behind a wall.

With Bacall, who put attempting to anchor him before her own stellar career, some of those walls at last came down. ‘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…’ he tells us here.

These, and so many more in the great found script, are lines to stay with you. They build into a nuanced portrait. As with any film inspired by real people, whether a biopic or a documentary, there’s a certain amount of guess work and ‘hunches’ needed by the creative team too. The power of this one is to make a Hollywood myth feel fresh and new, almost seventy years after Bogart’s untimely death at 57. Bogart: Life in Flashes convinces viewers that we’ve spent a couple of hours in the presence of a legend, who in this empathetic telling at least, is certainly allowed to have vulnerabilities like anyone else.