Bogart: Life in Flashes
Bogart: Life in Flashes begins at the end, with footage from the actor’s 1957 funeral, before doubling back to his birth and racing through his life chronologically—in flashes of image and insight.
Humphrey Bogart is among the few figures from Hollywood’s golden age who continues transcend that era. By the time he hit stardom in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Bogart wore his persona like the comfortably broken-in trench coats his characters often wore. He wasn’t romantically handsome but ruggedly masculine, skeptical of authority, disdainful of phonies. The potential to lash out violently was restrained by a demeanor of “Go ahead, hit me” cool. Anyone who took the dare regreted it.
Director Kathryn Ferguson (who previously helmed a film about Sinéad O'Connor) composed her documentary in fast-moving snippets. Bits of Bogart films intersect with clips from old TV interviews with wife-costar Lauren Bacall, costar Kathryn Hepburn, manager Sam Jaffe and others. The story is spliced with home movies from his house and his beloved sailboat, the Santana. Bogart is glimpsed on Ed Sullivan and in a wartime newsreel. There’s a blip from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) whose over-his-head protagonist modeled himself on Bogie.
And of course, still photos from Bogart’s childhood. His mother, one of America’s top illustrators, used his likeness as the face for many children’s products. He grew up in affluence but rebelled; expelled from Andover, he joined the Navy but never saw combat and was drawn to Broadway where his first wife, theater star Helen Menken, got him his first roles on stage. In private, he never entirely shed the good manners of his class but seemed to have a chip—not on his shoulder but across his face. He tested people, poking them for a response. Drink loosened his inhibitions against bad behavior. According to sources heard in Life in Flashes, the unhappy but brilliant screenwriter he played in In a Lonely Place (1950) was close to the real Bogart.
Casablanca (1942) was where Bogart made his deepest, most enduring impression as the American loner, reluctantly drawn from isolation into engagement with a cause greater than his own pain. As Life in Flashes recounts, he had a chance to live out the role when he flew with Bacall to Washington in 1947 to stand up for the Hollywood contingent accused of Communism by the House Un-American Activities Committee. But like nearly all of his colleagues, and millions of American, he soon fell silent from fear.
