Apple TV: “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes”

Humphrey Bogart could be called many things, but “pretentious” was not one of them. When asked if he thought he could succeed as a romantic lead in “Casablanca,” he replied, “When the camera moves in on that Bergman face, and she's saying she loves you, it would make anybody feel romantic."

Bogie’s movies like “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Big Sleep” are regarded as classics. But he once commented, “I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history.”

Such anecdotes are catnip to movie fans like me, and you’ll find plenty more in “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes:” (2024), the first official documentary about Bogie’s entirely-too-short film career.

Through clips and existing archival interviews, “Flashes,” directed by Kathryn Ferguson, tells the womb-to-tomb story of an actor who started out in life as anything but a tough guy. Born on Christmas Da

y, 1899 and raised at West End Avenue and 104th Street in Manhattan, he enjoyed a privileged upbringing—his father was a physician and his mother was a highly paid illustrator who seemed to enjoy illustrating more than mothering.

Kicked out of Andover for bad behavior, he served in the Navy toward the end of WW I, then gradually drifted into stage acting, where he had a number of roles in very forgettable plays. Critic Alexander Woolcott once dubbed Bogart’s acting “what is usually and mercifully described as adequate.”

His first trip to Hollywood was only exceeded in dreadfulness by his equally fruitless return to Broadway in the mid-1920s, then a second trip to the Coast. Finally, in 1936 he teamed up with a young director named John Huston for the film version of Sherwood Anderson’s “The Petrified Forest” (1936) which established his tough guy image for the ages. It also led to countless more Warner Brothers films where he was either shot, killed or thrown down a flight of stairs.

For all the triumphs he enjoyed in Hollywood, he was a failure at marriage, three times in a row. Bogie and his third wife, actress Mayo Methot, became known as “The Battling Bogarts” because of their vicious, mano-a-mano fights in public (even at their wedding reception). Mayo tried to shoot him no fewer than three times; fortunately for us, she always missed.

Like Ernest Hemingway, Bogie’s fourth wife was the charm—a sexy 19-year-old Vogue cover girl named Betty Perske (renamed Lauren Bacall by Jack Warner) who brought Bogie stability and a new perspective for the last 11 years of his life. He died in January 1957.

The documentary is consistently fascinating—replete with home movies of Bogie and Bacall sailing in California, as well as onscreen commentary from Katharine Hepburn and John Huston. The film also points out that Bogie was a major alcoholic; he quipped that he and Huston drank so much on the set of “The African Queen,” that “whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead.”

The NYT called Bogie “the embodiment of brooding cinematic cool.” The world will remember him as Rick, the caustic, yet soft-hearted American bar owner who wouldn’t blink in the face of fascism. “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes,” now streaming on Apple TV, captures it all.

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