After he was expelled from school, Maud Humphrey told her son, “You’re on your own from now on.” For Ferguson, the pair’s complicated bond naturally anchored Bogart’s origin story. “[Maud] was one of the highest-paid artists at the turn of the century and a leading suffragette,” Ferguson says. “While she was obviously incredibly prolific and successful, he felt that she wasn’t the mother that he needed—and I feel like this goes on to shape the trajectory of his life and his love life.”
The film follows Bogart’s tough beginnings as an actor, convinced he’ll never make a career of it while struggling with alcoholism and a string of “dreadful” parts. Within that relatively established narrative, we get to know another side of his early years. Ferguson examines Bogart’s relationship with his first wife, actress Helen Menken, by zeroing in on her participation in the 1926 play The Captive, a controversial and radical piece depicting women in love. As Life Comes in Flashes tells it, Bogart encouraged her to do the play and supported its contents. But Menken was arrested for her participation, and the play shut down—informing Bogart’s lifelong (and increasingly conflicted) fight against censorship in Hollywood.
All the while, Bogart stews over the direction of his career, his “resentment” at being a contracted employee of studios. He listens to his mother insult his career. “He was really a loner in a way,” Stephen says. “The relationships with his wives were not really a familial thing. They were part of the business.”
By David Lee Guss / University of Wisconsin; Courtesy of NBC Universal Pictures Content Group
That business could get quite volatile. Perhaps the movie’s most fascinating section relitigates the (literally) fiery marriage between Bogart and Mayo Methot, an actress eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia who attempted suicide during their relationship. Accounts of the tempestuous, dramatic seven-year union between them have tended to dismiss Methot as unstable and irrelevant. But this was the same time that Bogart’s career turned around after age 40, with the release of The Maltese Falcon and production of Casablanca catapulting him to superstardom. These milestones are covered by Life Comes in Flashes, but Methot’s presence during them is insisted upon—including an infamous collision she had with Bogart while he was filming Casablanca.