Reintroducing Humphrey Bogart: The Untold Stories of a Hollywood Icon’s Volatile Private Life

You’re looking at an actor who’s made more lousy pictures than anyone in history,” Humphrey Bogart says at one point in Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes, a new documentary about his life and career. “And I always wound up dead and never got the girl.”

It’s one of hundreds of quotes from the man himself that animates the film, directed by Kathryn Ferguson and told entirely—and rather miraculously—in the late Hollywood icon’s own words. It’s the story of a journeyman actor who found sudden stardom late in his career—and in his real life, this guy tended to get the girl.

This is the gist of Ferguson’s film, a fascinating and fresh reframing that traces Bogart’s life through his relationships with women. An Irish director best known for helming the Sinead O’Connor doc Nothing Compares, Ferguson saw that mining these untold stories would allow audiences to understand the star of Casablanca and The Big Sleep in a new, more complex way. “What we realized quite quickly from this deep dive was, these remarkable women in his life had been left as footnotes in history,” Ferguson says. “Their stories really interweaved with his in such a meaningful way. We felt like they hadn’t been told—and it would feel like a myth to tell his story without deeply diving into theirs.”

Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes (the Universal Pictures Content Group production will release this fall) traces Bogart’s life, from his privileged upbringing—specifically his fraught dynamic with his mother, the pioneering suffragette Maud Humphrey—to his final marriage to fellow screen icon Lauren Bacall, who was 25 years his junior. Ferguson and her team, producer Eleanor Emptage and editor Mick Mahon, combed through every interview with Bogart, as well as every book, article, and blog post they could find quoting him, before condensing all of it into a cogent script.

By Edward Roth / Alamy Stock Photo; Courtesy of NBC Universal Pictures Content Group

They had help from both of Bogart’s children; Stephen Bogart worked in a formal advisory capacity, sitting for interviews and sharing archival material with the creative team. (Above, you can watch a compilation of star-studded home videos Stephen edited exclusively for Vanity Fair.) “They were very generous with what they had, and they let us get on with the job at hand and create the film that we wanted to make,” Ferguson says.

Stephen Bogart has written books about his father, who died when he was just eight years old. He has given talks and researched him exhaustively. He thought he’d seen every version of his father’s story, and felt ready to move on. But Ferguson presented him with a new approach—and something he knew would feel original to audiences. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it,” Stephen tells me. “It’s an arc that hasn’t been told…. People haven’t heard it all because everything that I’ve heard hasn’t been out there. But this has really delved into the intricacies of who he was.”

After he was expelled from school, Maud Humphrey told her son, “You’re on your own from now on.” For Ferguson, the pair’s complicated bond naturally anchored Bogart’s origin story. “[Maud] was one of the highest-paid artists at the turn of the century and a leading suffragette,” Ferguson says. “While she was obviously incredibly prolific and successful, he felt that she wasn’t the mother that he needed—and I feel like this goes on to shape the trajectory of his life and his love life.”

The film follows Bogart’s tough beginnings as an actor, convinced he’ll never make a career of it while struggling with alcoholism and a string of “dreadful” parts. Within that relatively established narrative, we get to know another side of his early years. Ferguson examines Bogart’s relationship with his first wife, actress Helen Menken, by zeroing in on her participation in the 1926 play The Captive, a controversial and radical piece depicting women in love. As Life Comes in Flashes tells it, Bogart encouraged her to do the play and supported its contents. But Menken was arrested for her participation, and the play shut down—informing Bogart’s lifelong (and increasingly conflicted) fight against censorship in Hollywood.

All the while, Bogart stews over the direction of his career, his “resentment” at being a contracted employee of studios. He listens to his mother insult his career. “He was really a loner in a way,” Stephen says. “The relationships with his wives were not really a familial thing. They were part of the business.”

By David Lee Guss / University of Wisconsin; Courtesy of NBC Universal Pictures Content Group

That business could get quite volatile. Perhaps the movie’s most fascinating section relitigates the (literally) fiery marriage between Bogart and Mayo Methot, an actress eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia who attempted suicide during their relationship. Accounts of the tempestuous, dramatic seven-year union between them have tended to dismiss Methot as unstable and irrelevant. But this was the same time that Bogart’s career turned around after age 40, with the release of The Maltese Falcon and production of Casablanca catapulting him to superstardom. These milestones are covered by Life Comes in Flashes, but Methot’s presence during them is insisted upon—including an infamous collision she had with Bogart while he was filming Casablanca.

Bogart and Methot were about the same age, and both doing relatively well when they first met, says Ferguson. “But his career escalator starts to go up as hers goes down—and the key reason for that is age and sexism and the fact that those roles just weren’t available for women anymore. She had to stand back and watch her partner blast off into the stratospheres of success and be okay with that.” The filmmaker felt a responsibility to tell Methot’s story differently. “We were very keen to change the narrative around her. It’s a very complex narrative, and obviously there are huge problems between them, but we just felt like we wanted to do her justice and not leave her in the position of how she has been left behind by history.”

The film uses Bogart’s own words to weave that narrative, meaning that we get his own novel perspective on that time period as well. “Just when I thought everything had been said about him, I reacted to that—there’s still a lot to learn for people,” Stephen says.

From Getty Images; Courtesy of NBC Universal Pictures Content Group

Not everything in Bogart is said out loud—with Bogart as our exclusive narrator, how could it be? One must read between the lines a bit when it comes to the ultimate love affair of the actor’s life: his romance with Bacall, which began during his marriage to Methot and lasted until his death from esophageal cancer in 1957. Bacall was 19 when she fell for a 44-year-old Bogart while making To Have and Have Not, and they worked together repeatedly thereafter. The age gap—to say nothing of Bogart’s mandate that she not travel without him—has kept eyebrows raised for many decades. But in the film, the love between them is put into sharp focus. (All told, Bogart and Bacall were married for 12 years.)

“I hope what we’ve managed to do is just tell it as it is from everything that we’ve been able to find,” Ferguson says. “There was a genuine love there, and a partnership there…. He’s paradoxical. We haven’t left anything out. It’s a hard watch at points, but we felt it was very important to include the truth and everything that’s there.” Bogart wasn’t a man who left much out. He just needed the right filmmaker to find a fresh way to put it all together.

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