In Memoriam: Lauren Bacall

Laruen Bacall belonged to a different era. One where a few women celebrities transcended stardom and sexuality to become living legends who graced the screen with their sensuality, charm, and intelligence. Gone are the great Dames of Hollywood: Barbara Stanwyck, Bettie Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, and the like. They have been replaced by the modern Hollywood celebrity who seems to come and go with their fifteen seconds of fame. Meryl Streep inherited these amazing actresses’ legacies and is an exception as is Jennifer Lawrence who seems to be both of the older generation and yet young as well. Unlike many of her peers, Lauren Bacall’s career continued late into the 2000’s and she gave some of her best performances not as the sexual icon she was so well known for, but as a great powerful stateswoman of cinema.

I first remember hearing Lauren Bacall before I saw her. Her voice reminds me of the movie Her where someone could actually just fall in love with a voice. Raspy, yet sensual, confident yet passionate and emotional, Lauren’s voice could level whole rooms. I love that in her later years she would lend her voice to Miyazaki’s animated Howl’s Moving Castle as the Witch of Waste, one of my favorite casting choices in a Miyazaki dub. But, the film I heard her in was The Big Sleep where she danced in a dialogue duo with her equal Humphrey Bogart. I was extremely young, maybe five, when I first saw The Big Sleep, one of my father’s favorite films. I didn’t understand the plot as complicated as it is and certainly not the opening scene written by William Faulkner, but I did understand that something great was happening. When you put Bacall and Bogart in the same room, their ability for verbal wit and one-upmanship elevated their performances and you could feel their chemistry on screen. Only someone as intelligent as Bacall could play Vivian Rutledge who is being pulled in so many directions and must try to manipulate Philip Marlowe for her own purposes.

I think Lauren Bacall’s legend, unfortunately, grew immensely with her passionate public romance and marriage to Humphrey Bogart who was twenty five years her senior. I would like to believe that without their romance she still would be considered one of the great actresses. She herself even said that her obituaries would be filled with Bogart and they have been (including mine). But, it is impossible to divorce the two of them, just as it is impossible to divorce Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn whose romances were infamous in their day. Bacall and Bogart made four films together, first meeting in To Have or Have Not, a vehicle similar to Casablanca, but lacking some of its magic. It certainly did have great lines and the most infamous being from Bacall: “You know how to whistle don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” The Big Sleep, previously mentioned, is probably their most famous collaboration, after which, they made Dark Passage and Key Largo, perhaps my second favorite of their collaborations.

John Huston who directed Key Largo created one of the great film noirs in which Humphrey Bogart’s Frank McCloud visits the widow of his WWII companion at the hotel that she and her father-in-law run. But as a hurricane bares down on the hotel, gangsters arrive to take shelter from the storm and a confrontation grows and builds so beautifully, with tension matched in Hitchcock films.

But I knew Bacall as a modern actress where she almost always played a powerful woman or matriarch. Her small role in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville as Ma Ginger is the performance I cling to besides Kidman’s who is unmatched in the film. The Mirror Has Two Faces, not a great film by any means, gave Bacall the chance to play a Mrs. Robinson type character, something she seemed destined to do. But it is her take as Nicole Kidman’s mother in another movie, Birth, that I think is one of her great performances.

Birth is an underrated masterpiece. It is a hard film to understand or watch. Nicole Kidman plays a widower, Anna, who lost the love of her life to a heart attack while running in central park over a decade ago. Now she has moved on with her life and her mother, played by Lauren Bacall, has blessed her engagement to Joseph, played by Danny Huston. Then a young boy, Sean (Cameron Bright) shows up and claims to be her reincarnated husband. He has memories that no one else besides Anna possess. Slowly she is won over by the possibility that he may in fact be her husband and the transformation occurs during an opera in an incredible nine minute close up on Kidman’s face. Eleanor of course reacts as any mother would with the conviction that her daughter has lost her mind. Bacall infuses Eleanor with the power of a matriarch who is not used to her judgment being questioned by members of her family and her relationship with her daughter forms the backbone of reason to Anna’s continued unreasonable belief that this young boy is in fact her late husband.

With Lauren Bacall’s passing on August 12, 2014 at the age of 89, it does seem like the Golden Age of Hollywood has finally ended. I hope though that those who adored her more famous performances of youth will seek out some of her incredible performances later in her life.