The Essentials: Lauren Bacall’s Best Performances

“Written on the Wind” (1956)
A dizzyingly lush melodrama from the absolute master of dizzyingly lush melodrama Douglas Sirk, “Written On The Wind” (also: awesome title, awesome song) was again loosely based on real people, this time tobacco heir Zachary Smith-Reynolds and his wife Libby Holman. But the operative word must surely be “loosely,” because it’s hard for us to believe that anyone, aside from maybe the Dos Equis guy, could possibly have had so much happen to them. Bacall’s role is of the secretary who marries into the weird, f*cked up Hadley family, getting petulant, dissipated Robert Stack for a husband and amped-up nymphomaniac Dorothy Malone for a sister in law. Having to be more or less the calm center and occasionally the tragic victim of so much madness around her (the now-platinum blonde Malone tears it up and won an Oscar), Bacall seems to have been saddled with the straight-man role even though her character is also involved in a love, um, rectangle with Rock Hudson’s good-guy family friend. But even in a film as wildly over the top as ‘Written on the Wind,’ you can see Bacall maturing as an actress: Whatever tenuous connection to reality this film has, with its overtly stagy sets and florid, ostentatiously artificial design, is largely due to her unshowy underplaying as the film’s heart and moral compass. Everything else is gloriously entertaining, cleverly constructed, but shameless soap. Like the scene below, finding Stack sweeps secretary Bacall off her feet by setting her up in a suite brimming with flowers and with a closet full of ball gowns.

“Designing Woman” (1957)
Often mistakenly described as a remake of the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn classic “Woman of the Year,” this battle-of-the-sexes comedy is in fact, its own thing, despite similar premises. Originally intended for Grace Kelly and James Stewart before Kelly decided to marry her Prince, the Oscar-winning script instead fell into the hands of Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall, neither noted for their comedic work, especially during this stage of their careers, and yet who both strike exactly the right frothy, back-and-forth, bantering tone. It’s particularly remarkable from Bacall if you consider that while the film was shooting, her husband Bogart was dying —she had taken the previous year off to nurse him, but her returning to work on this film had reportedly been his idea. She later referred to the filming as almost like therapy with respect to the pain vigils at home, and certainly no grief haunts this lighthearted odd-couple comedy, in which a pair of newlyweds, a high fashion designer, and a bachelor sports writer, have to negotiate misunderstandings and getting-to-know-you complications following a whirlwind romance. Director Vincente Minelli keeps the movie spinning along with wit and warmth, especially in clever use of ironic he-says/she-says voiceover and there’s real chemistry between old friends Peck and Bacall. And even if the setup and some of the gags have dated poorly, Bacall’s wardrobe is never less than exquisite and the battle-of-the-wits sparring between the two, as well as Bacall’s innate intelligence and aura of independence,  suggest an equality of agency even when the narrative undercuts it.

Supporting Performances & Honorable mentions: We wanted to concentrate our main picks on Bacall’s lead roles, but she turned in some excellent supporting performances, especially later in her career at an age where leads are much harder to come by. She gained her only Oscar nomination (though she was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2010) for a film she herself agreed was ”not a great picture but a very good part” as the conniving, vain, overbearing mother of Barbara Streisand’s character in “The Mirror has Two Faces.” She also played a memorable role in Lars von Trier’s experimental “Dogville” (and returned for its less successful follow-up “Manderlay”) and played again opposite “Dogville” star Nicole Kidman in the vastly underrated “Birth” from Jonathan Glazer, which if you haven’t been persuaded to watch yet despite all our hollering, well, you’re incorrigible. Bacall also played James Caan’s agent in the terrific “Misery” and one of the central trio of “walkees” in Paul Schrader’s undervalued “The Walker.”

In largely forgotten, deconstructionist take on film noir “Harper,” starring Paul Newman and Janet Leigh, Bacall’s presence was a sly nod back to “The Big Sleep” and it’s an interesting film that’s worth seeking out. She also played alongside John Wayne in his final performance “The Shootist,” which is undoubtedly far more his film than hers, in being a farewell to audiences and to the Western myth in general for The Duke, but she’s impressively steely as the widow whose good opinion he finally earns. And last but not least Bacall played the hard-bitten brains of the gold-digging operation in “How to Marry a Millionaire.” The comedy, which co-starred Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe, isn’t that great, in that it’s so archaic in its gender roles that it’s occasionally hard to watch, especially seeing Bacall trying to fit the square peg of her flinty, individualist persona into the round hole of a calculating schemer on the lookout for a rich husband, but it does give her a few sweet lines. Our favorite among them is probably the meta-referential moment when her character, Schatze is extolling the virtues of older men marrying younger women: “Look at Roosevelt, look at Churchill, look at old fella, what’s his name in ‘The African Queen.’”

A charismatic, poised and graceful performer, Lauren Bacall always gave the impression of there being so much more to her than met the eye, even though what met the eye was so very lovely. Share with us your own favorite Bacall moments below, but for now, this is how we always want to remember her: zinging Bogie about Marcel Proust.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHV1hnHiXGg