Produced in cooperation with Humphrey Bogart’s estate, the documentary “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” is an official portrait that nevertheless offers some insights into how one of Hollywood’s most recognizable and irreplaceable star personas evolved.
Directed by Kathryn Ferguson, the film traces Bogart’s development from stage and backlot workhorse to timeless avatar of brooding cool. Louise Brooks, the great silent-screen star who died in 1985, is one of many Bogart friends whose recollections are featured in the film. She suggested that the reason Bogart could bring such complexity to Dixon Steele, the violent-tempered screenwriter he played in Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” (1950), was because of how much he and Dix had in common.
Bogart is portrayed in “Life Comes in Flashes” as a product of cold parenting. (His mother, Maud Humphrey, was an accomplished illustrator apparently dismissed by her son as a “housewife” on her death certificate, according to one interview subject.) He married three actresses — Helen Menken, Mary Philips and Mayo Methot — before Lauren Bacall. Each one is shown to have sharpened Bogart, even as his fame eclipsed theirs, to varying degrees.
Words attributed to Bogart are read by Kerry Shale, an actor whose voice is dissimilar enough from Bogart’s to qualify as a distraction, at least initially. But Bogart’s own memories, and the way they’re illustrated with film clips, give the documentary a certain mystique. And it’s tough to resist gossip about Bogart’s friction with the film executive Jack Warner or even well-worn tales of the adventurer’s attitude that the director John Huston brought to the set of “The African Queen.” The two men drank so much, Bogart says in a much-cited quip that the movie repeats, “Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead.”
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