From his absent mother to Lauren Bacall, the greatest love: the untold private life of Humphrey Bogart

“You’re looking at an actor who has made more bad movies than anyone in history,” says Humphrey Bogart at one point in Bogart: Life Comes in Flashesa new documentary about his private and professional life. “And I always ended up dead without ever getting the girl.”

It’s one of hundreds of quotes from Bogart himself that animate the film, directed by Kathryn Ferguson and told entirely (and rather prodigiously) in the words of the late Hollywood icon. It’s the story of a reliable but not great actor who found sudden stardom towards the end of his career and who, in real life, tended to get the girls.

This is the gist of Ferguson’s film, a new and fascinating retelling that traces Bogart’s life through his relationships with women. Ferguson, Irish director best known for directing the documentary on Sinead O’Connor Nothing Comparesrealized that bringing these untold stories to light would allow audiences to understand the star of Casablanca And The big sleep in a new and more complex way. “This insight made us realize pretty quickly that the extraordinary women in his life had been left as footnotes in history,” Ferguson says. “Their stories really intertwined with his in an extremely meaningful way. We had the impression that they had not been told, and that telling his story without delving into theirs would have been a mystification.”

Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes (the Universal Pictures Content Group production will be released in the autumn) traces Bogart’s life, from his privileged upbringing (in particular the conflicting dynamic with his mother, the pioneering suffragette Maud Humphrey) to his last marriage with colleague and cinema icon Lauren Bacall, 25 years younger. Ferguson and her team, the producer Eleanor Emptage and the editor Mick Mahonthey combed through every interview with Bogart, as well as every book, article and blog post that mentioned him, before condensing it all into a convincing screenplay.

Both of Bogart’s sons also helped them: Stephen Bogart he formally worked as a consultant, giving interviews and sharing archival material with the creative team (above, you can see a compilation of movie star-studded home videos that Stephen edited exclusively for Vanity Fair). “They told everything they knew without censorship, and allowed us to get on with the job and make the film we wanted to make,” says Ferguson.

Stephen Bogart has written several books about his father, who died when he was only eight years old. He lectured and did extensive research on him. He thought he had seen all sides of his father’s story and felt ready to move on. But Ferguson presented him with a new approach (and something he thought audiences would find original). “Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it,” Stephen tells me. «It’s an arc that hasn’t been told (…) People haven’t heard everything, because nothing I’ve heard has been made public yet. But this film really delved into the complexities of his person.”

By Masheter Movie Archive / Alamy Stock Photo; Courtesy of NBC Universal Pictures Content Group

After her son was expelled from school, Maud Humphrey told him, “From now on you will have to fend for yourself.” For Ferguson, it was the complicated bond between the two that naturally shaped Bogart’s origin story. “Maud was one of the highest paid artists at the turn of the century, as well as one of the first and most important suffragettes,” says Ferguson. “Even though she was obviously very prolific and very successful, he felt she wasn’t the mother he needed… and I feel like that affected the trajectory of his life and his love life.”

The film chronicles the difficult acting beginnings of Bogart, who was convinced he couldn’t make his job, while struggling with alcoholism and a series of “terrible” roles. Within this relatively established narrative, we begin to learn about another side of his early years. Ferguson examines Bogart’s relationship with his first wife, actress Helen Menken, focusing on his participation in The prisonera controversial and radical 1926 play about female homosexuality. According to what he says Life Comes in FlashesBogart encouraged his wife to star in the play and defended its subject. But Menken was arrested for taking part in it and the show was suspended, a fact that inspired Bogart’s lifelong and increasingly contentious fight against censorship in Hollywood.

Meanwhile, Bogart ruminates on the direction his career is taking and the “resentment” he feels about being a temporary contract employee of production companies. He listens to his mother insult his career. “In a way, he was very much a loner,” Stephen says. “Relationships with his wives weren’t really a family affair. They were part of the job.”

By David Lee Guss / University of Wisconsin; Courtesy of NBC Universal Pictures Content Group

A job that could become decidedly precarious. Perhaps the most fascinating part of the film is the one that calls into question Bogart’s (literally) fiery marriage to Mayo Methot, an actress who was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and who attempted suicide during their relationship. Reports of the pair’s stormy and dramatic seven-year union have typically dismissed Methot as “unstable” and “irrelevant.” But this was the same time Bogart’s career took a turning point after age 40, when the release of The mystery of the falcon and the production of Casablanca made him rise to worldwide fame. Life Comes in Flashes cites these milestones, but particularly insists on Methot’s presence in this phase, including the infamous confrontation he had with Bogart during the filming of Casablanca.

According to Ferguson, when Bogart and Methot first met they were more or less the same age and were both doing relatively well. «But while for him the career escalator is ascending, hers is descending, and this is mainly due to age, sexism and the fact that those roles were simply no longer available to women. Methot had to step aside, witness his partner’s stratospheric success and let it go well.” The director felt a responsibility to tell Methot’s story differently. “We were eager to change the narrative about her. It’s a very complex narrative and obviously there are huge problems between them, but we just felt we wanted to do it justice rather than leave it in the position that the story has left it in.”

To weave the plot, the film uses Bogart’s own words, which also gives us his unique perspective on that period. “Just when I thought everything had been said about him, I had a reaction: people still have a lot to learn,” says Stephen.

From Getty Images; Courtesy of NBC Universal Pictures Content Group

In Bogart not everything is said explicitly: how could it be otherwise, after all, if the only narrative voice is that of Bogart? You have to read between the lines a little, for example, when it comes to the most important romantic relationship of the actor’s life: his love affair with Bacall, which began while he was married to Methot and lasted until the actor’s death for esophageal cancer in 1957. Bacall was 19 when she fell in love with 44-year-old Bogart while making Southern watersand the two subsequently worked together repeatedly. The age difference (not to mention Bogart’s ban on Bacall traveling without him) has raised eyebrows for many decades. In the film, however, the love between the two comes into sharp focus (in total, Bogart and Bacall were married for 12 years).

“I hope we were able to tell things as they happened based on everything we were able to find,” says Ferguson. «Between them there was genuine love, and there was complicity (…) It’s paradoxical. We haven’t left anything out. At times it is a difficult vision, but we felt it was very important to include the truth and every piece of the story.” Bogart was not a man who left out much. He just needed the right director to figure out how to put it all together.