Kvery useful and enjoyable documentary by athrin ferguson on Humphrey Bogart takes us through his extraordinary, almost mythical life story; uses clips, voice-overs and existing interview archives (including the inescapable and indispensable Dick Cavett), but no new on-camera material.
Bogart was the son of a prominent New York surgeon and a fine artist, illustrator and suffragette, and could easily have become a dull bourgeois East Coast professional had it not been for his academic performance and love of acting that took him from Broadway to Hollywood. The case of his rugged good looks and unmistakable voice landed 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 necessary in the 1930s and 1940s, when the US stood up to the fascists, the apotheosis, of course, was his grizzled patriot-romantic Rick in Casablanca.
Bogart also had an improbable, almost tragicomic marital history; Ferguson gives us a very convincing, almost Tudor legend of Humphrey the First’s four wives, showing us how each woman gave Bogart what he needed and wanted. Elegant stage star Helen Menken gave him a Broadway break; the hidden actor Mary Phillips brought him peace and stability during a difficult period in which decent roles did not come; troubled, excitable star Mayo Methot—who stabbed and threatened to shoot Bogart during some of their many heated disagreements—inflamed Bogart’s sense of self on and off screen; and finally 19-year-old Lauren “Betty” Bacall, who made Bogart blossom with late-life love and the responsibilities of fatherhood. In fact, Bacall was the only wife who was not a sacrificial figure; his previous wives disappear from his life and (largely) from the film record as Bogart moves on.
It’s a candid look at Bogart, whose heavy smoking and drinking caused him to die aged 57, looking much older than that – although the film is tight-lipped about his hairstyle. Perhaps more could be said for his vigorous post-war anti-McCarthy stance, from which he was, humiliatingly, forced to make a partial descent. But it’s a very entertaining account of an actor who seems to rise, in his own right, to a higher level than anyone else from Hollywood’s golden age.
