“Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” Delivers Goods

Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes (Kathryn Ferguson, 2024) 3½ out of 5 stars

Born on Christmas Day in 1899, Humphrey DeForest Bogart would grow up to become, eventually, one of the most celebrated actors of Hollywood’s classic period. The  American Film Institute lists him at the top of their Top 25 Male Stars of the 20^th century, even though he died of cancer in 1957, barely halfway through that century. In her new documentary, Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes, director Kathryn Ferguson (Nothing Compares) presents a comprehensive portrait of the man, both on and off screen.

For fans of Bogie—as he is informally known—the movie is a treasure trove. For others, it’s a terrific history lesson, at least about one man, with some additional context about those around him and the surrounding decades. If it’s never much more than that, cinephiles won’t mind. We can still sit back and enjoy the clips.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a lifelong fan of the actor’s work, ever since a school friend gifted me Nathaniel Benchley’s 1975 book entitled simply Humphrey Bogart. I hadn’t even seen any of his films yet at that point, though Casablanca (1942) would soon catch my attention. Other films that came to be favorites include The Petrified Forest (1936), High Sierra (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), and Sabrina (1954). In short, I did not go into Ferguson’s documentary blind, Far from it. But I still enjoyed myself thoroughly.

Bogart’s rise to fame was never a sure thing. It wasn’t until The Petrified Forest was brought from stage to screen and lead actor Leslie Howard insisted on Bogart making the leap, as the criminal villain. from Broadway with him that the man’s luck began to change. Still, for a while he continued to play gangsters until in 1940 writer John Huston and director Raoul Walsh gave him a chance to be a romantic gangster in High Sierra. From there he made the leap to (mostly) law-abiding lead in Huston’s directorial debut The Maltese Falcon and then to full-blown star in Casablanca, for which he garnered his first of three Best Actor nominations (he would win his only Oscar for The African Queen). All of this is well-covered in the film.

So are his four marriages (the last to Lauren Bacall, a monumental actor in her own right), his political leanings—including his initial attempt to go up against the Hollywood Blacklist and then his backtracking once that didn’t go so well—and other assorted details from his life. Ferguson populates the narrative with a great variety of commentary, including Bogart’s, from an impressive collection of archival material. Respecting that archive, she keeps the entire documentary in a 4:3 aspect ratio, never breaking from that squarish frame and using it to ground us in Bogart’s era.

It’s a thoroughly engaging work, with many insights into what motivated its subject. I’m not the biggest fan of the occasional recreations within it, however, nor of the offscreen voice used to speak Bogart’s written words (it sounds nothing like him). Still, as a primer on this important cinematic icon who, though to the manor born, ended up playing some of Hollywood’s best rough characters, Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes delivers the goods. Here’s looking at you, kid.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.