Kathryn Ferguson’s very serviceable and enjoyable documentary about Humphrey Bogart takes us through his extraordinary, almost mythic life story; it uses clips, voiceovers and existing interview archives (including the inevitable and indispensable Dick Cavett) but no new on-camera material.
Bogart was the son of a distinguished New York surgeon and a refined artist, illustrator and suffragette and might easily have become a bland east coast bourgeois professional, were it not for his academic underperformance and love of acting which took him from Broadway to Hollywood. The accident of his rugged looks and unmistakable voice brought him tough-guy roles under the whip of studio boss Jack Warner, and he became the face of heroic masculinity – what Helen Hayes called Bogart’s “plain old shoe face” – which was called for in the 30s and 40s when the US stood up to fascists, the apotheosis of course being his grizzled patriot-romantic Rick in Casablanca.
Bogart also had an incredible, almost tragicomic marital history; Ferguson gives us a very persuasive, almost Tudor legend of the four wives of Humphrey the First, showing us how each woman gave Bogart what he needed and wanted. Elegant stage star Helen Menken gave him his Broadway break; self-effacing actor Mary Philips brought him calm and stability during a difficult period in which the decent roles weren’t coming; troubled, excitable star Mayo Methot – who stabbed and threatened to shoot Bogart during some of their many tempestuous disagreements – put fire into Bogart’s sense of on- and off-screen self; and finally 19-year-old Lauren “Betty” Bacall who caused Bogart to blossom with late-life love and the responsibilities of fatherhood. In fact, Bacall was the only wife not to be a sacrificial figure; his previous wives disappearing from his life and (largely) from the movie record when Bogart moved on.
This is a candid look at Bogart, whose heavy smoking and drinking caused him to die at 57, looking a fair bit older than that – although the film is reticent on the subject of his hairpiece. Perhaps more could have been said about his spirited postwar anti-McCarthyite stand from which he, mortifyingly, was forced to make a partial climbdown. But this is a very entertaining account of an actor who appeared to ascend, singly, to a higher plane than all others of the Hollywood golden age.
• Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes is on digital platforms from 9 December.
