HAVING created perhaps the definitive documentary on Sinéad O‘Connor with 2022’s award-winning Nothing Compares, director Kathryn Ferguson is now telling a rather different life story with her film on Hollywood legend Humphrey Bogart.
Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes reveals parallels between these two very different icons, who both found themselves at odds with the establishment.
Sinéad O’Connor used her early 1990s superstardom as a platform to highlight the then all-powerful Catholic Church’s abuses in Ireland: after tearing up a photo of the Pope on US TV, the music and entertainment business closed ranks and her career nosedived.
As the post-war ‘Red Scare’ began to take root in America during the mid-1940s, Bogart set up The Committee for the First Amendment, a movie star-studded push-back against the House Un-American Activities Committee which was then beginning to target actors and film-makers with supposed ‘Communist sympathies’.
However, Bogart lacked the courage to follow-through on his initial conviction: despite taking part in a high profile Hollywood visitation to Washington DC in 1947, the actor quickly distanced himself from the campaign when it threatened to damage his late-blooming box-office draw.
It probably saved his career, but as Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes reveals, it was a decision he would come to regret later in life.
We learn that the stakes were high for ‘Bogie’, as he was known to all. Born Humphrey DeForest Bogart on Christmas Day 1899 to his surgeon father Belmont Bogart and his mother, Maud Humphrey, an ace illustrator more focused on her hugely successful career than her children, the aspiring actor was 42 before scoring his first bona-fide hit as a leading man.
His portrayal of ace gumshoe Sam Spade in the 1941 film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, directed by his close friend John Huston - who would direct Bogart again a decade later in his Oscar-winning turn as a boozy boat captain in The African Queen - remains iconic.
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“Everything came very late to him,” says Belfast-born BFI Filmmaker Award-winner Ferguson, whose engrossing film explores Bogart’s relationships with the five key women in his life - his mother and his four wives, including the ‘love of his life’, fellow film star Lauren Bacall - while drawing upon a vast archive of memoir, interviews and letters to capture Bogart’s own opinions ‘in his own words’ via actor Kerry Shale’s voiceover.
“He had great tenacity and kept going. He basically had 20 years before he really got anywhere. And he was 46 before he met Lauren, which is a long time to wait for some sense of peace.
“He got it all in the last 15 years of his life, really.”
Bogart had great tenacity and kept going. He basically had 20 years before he really got anywhere.
— Kathryn Ferguson
As the film illustrates, an unrequited craving for his mother’s nurture likely impacted Bogart’s relationship with women for the rest of his life.
Made in cooperation with the Bogart estate and now available to stream on Apple TV+, Bogart: Life Comes In Flashes offers fascinating details about the long and lean stretches he endured as a struggling actor who failed to make an impact on critics and co-stars alike, first on Broadway and then in Hollywood as the ‘talkies’ era got underway during the 1920s.
We are shown how the New York-born performer struggled to make his mark on the screen until 1936, when he was cast as the be-stubbled villain Duke Mantee in the film adaptation of The Petrified Forest - a role he originated on stage alongside co-star Leslie Howard.
Although the studio wanted to re-cast Edward G Robinson in the role for the big screen, Howard insisted on Bogart: the Casablanca star later named his daughter after his loyal pal.
We also learn how the impact Bogart made in that picture was nearly undone when Warner Brothers put him to work as a ‘contract player’ for the next couple of years, portraying cookie-cutter toughs/gangsters in a succession of largely forgettable titles
In his personal life, the actor was drawn to fellow performers whose career-minded ambitions were fundamentally incompatible with his need to establish a more ’traditional' family life.
These early years of Bogart’s stuttering career coincided with a trio of tumultuous marriages to successful actors, Broadway stars Helen Menken and Mary Philips, and child star turned Hollywood starlet Mayo Methot.
He was with Mayo when he finally landed the movies that made his name - the aforementioned Maltese Falcon, 1942’s Oscar-winning Casablanca, and 1944’s classic detective picture The Big Sleep (playing opposite wife-to-be, Lauren Bacall) - all of which coincided with the implementation of the moralistic ‘Hays Code’ within the motion picture industry, which effectively wiped out the kind of rebellious, subversive roles Mayo excelled in.
Although the couple were nicknamed ‘The Battling Bogarts’ by their Hollywood chums, some of whom appear in the film to recount the violent, occasionally terrifying physical altercations they witnessed between the pair, Ferguson’s film underlines the importance of Bogart’s tumultuous, booze-fuelled seven year relationship with Mayo.
In the words of the late silent movie icon turned film essayist Louise Brooks, who is quoted frequently in the film and was the first to recognise the importance of the women in Bogart’s life, Mayo ‘set fire’ to Bogart, re-igniting his passions at a crucial middle-aged moment.
“We felt particularly that Mayo had been left behind [in Bogart’s story],“ explains Margate-based Ferguson of how she and co-writer/producing partner Eleanor Emptage were keen to foreground Mayo Methot in the doc.
“Anything we could find about her, she was always mentioned in a very derogatory way. She certainly fell foul to the Hollywood system with the ‘Hays Code’, and being an actor the same age as Bogart who was deemed far too old to continue playing lead roles even as he was on the trajectory to super-fame.
“We wanted to show them in tandem together to make a lot more sense of what went on in that relationship.
“The whole film is trying to deal with censorship from the get-go, with his relationship with Helen Menken and her play [The Captive] being ‘cancelled’ for playing a lesbian on Broadway, and also with Mayo Methot and how the ‘Hays Code’ deeply affected her career.
“It really charts the journey he was on with these women, right through to the Red Scare. It just felt like a really interesting theme for us to keep exploring, because it affected his life in every decade in a different way.”
Bogie finally met his match in Lauren Bacall, whom he met on 1944’s The Big Sleep. By the following year, he had divorced Mayo and married the woman he would spend the rest of his life with, fathering two children, Leslie and Stephen, before succumbing to cancer in 1957.
“By all accounts, she was seeking a father-like figure, and he was certainly seeking a woman who could nurture him,” says the director of Hollywood’s original ‘power couple’.
“There was a big mother wound with Bogart, and really what we were exploring overall in the film is how that affected his life and career trajectory.
“He and Lauren had a very happy 12 years together, and a family. They were each able to provide what the other was lacking.”
Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes is streaming on Apple TV+ now
