Her
voice comes at you low and flat, wildly insinuating, electric and
lingering. In another age, Lauren Bacall’s voice might have been called
mannish. When she opened her mouth in “To Have and Have Not” — taking a
long drag on a cigarette while locking Humphrey Bogart in her gaze — she
staked a claim on the screen and made an immortal Hollywood debut. But
in 1944 at the exquisitely tender age of 19, she was also projecting an
indelible screen persona: that of the tough, quick-witted American woman
who could fight the good fight alongside her man.
She
may not have been Rosie the Riveter and building bombers, but there was
something about Ms. Bacall, a New York girl turned Hollywood starlet,
that suggested a stubborn strength that could stand up to the times. The
movie is best remembered for its oft-quoted whistle line (oh, you know
how), but there’s far more to Ms. Bacall’s performance than that bit of
dialogue. Liberally adapted from the Hemingway novel, the Howard Hawks
film would cement Bogart as a romantic lead after “Casablanca.” He plays
Morgan, a.k.a. Steve, a caustic American who charters his fishing boat
off the coast of Vichy-controlled Martinique. Ms. Bacall plays Marie,
a.k.a. Slim, a thief and possibly a prostitute who lifts a wallet off a
chump under Bogart’s watch, but later helps him smuggle French partisans
out of the country.
If
the movie’s political backdrop tends to go missing in the mists of the
Bogart and Bacall legend — they fell in love during its making — it’s
understandable given how they steam up the joint. Before teaching him
how to whistle, Slim slides into Steve’s lap and leans down to kiss him.
“Whaddya do that for?” he says, as if the question needed asking. “Been
wondering whether I’d like it,” she says. He asks her verdict. She
murmurs “I don’t know yet” before going in for another try. This time,
he pulls her close, his hand circling her neck, and they kiss deeper and
longer. She stops, pulls back and stands, taking the camera with her,
and delivers the film’s other great line: “It’s even better when you
help.”
Lauren Bacall Dies at 89
CreditWarner Bros.
Decades
later, Ms. Bacall’s performance in “To Have and Have Not” has been so
memorialized and near-mummified that it can be easy to forget its
initial shock waves. James Agee liked Ms. Bacall in “To Have and Have
Not” (“the very entertaining, nervy, adolescent new blonde”) and
predicted in his review that the movie’s appeal was predicated on
whether you liked her even if he admitted he was no judge. “I can hardly
look at her, much less listen to her,” he wrote, “without getting
caught in a dilemma between a low whistle and a belly laugh. It has been
years since I have seen such amusing pseudo-toughness on the screen.”
Agee saw an “arrogant neophyte” and a film that had been constructed
around her as snugly as the form-fitting hound’s-tooth suit she wears so
well.
Not
everyone was wholly sold on Ms. Bacall’s coming out. Writing around the
same time as Agee, the critic Parker Tyler noted “the mild
Mephistophelian peaks of her eyebrows” and compared her with screen
goddesses like Gene Tierney and Rita Hayworth. (He should have thrown in
Veronica Lake.) Tyler was confounded by Ms. Bacall’s husk and doesn’t
seem to have known that, per Hawks’s instructions, she had stripped away
any trace of what he deemed a potential feminine flaw. After signing
her, Hawks had begun shaping Ms. Bacall, telling her, in an anecdote
related in Todd McCarthy’s invaluable biography “Howard Hawks: The Grey
Fox of Hollywood”: “When a woman gets excited or emotional, she tends to
raise her voice. Now, there is nothing more unattractive than
screeching.”
For
Tyler, the results were mannered and synthetic. Yet he also rightly
pinpointed an androgynous quality in Ms. Bacall that helped distinguish
her debut and made it such a playful gloss on the classic femme fatale:
“Her Hepburnesque Garbotoon, clearly confirmed in her subsequent
pictures, equals Dietrich travestied by a boyish voice.” Like Garbo and
Dietrich, two other goddesses that Tyler invoked, Ms. Bacall’s on-screen
presence in “To Have and Have Not” draws on both feminine and masculine
qualities that suggest an excitingly capable woman. Guided by Hawks,
Ms. Bacall calmed her trembling chin, gave Bogart a sexy little slap and
filled out her character with so much personality that she transcended
her third billing (after Walter Brennan) to become an erotic emblem of
American wit and war-ready grit.
It’s
been said of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that he gave her class
while she gave him sex. There’s another calculus in the Bogart and
Bacall pairing. Ingrid Bergman may have warmed Bogart up in
“Casablanca,” but it was Ms. Bacall who lit him on fire. She later
complained about being in his shadow; in truth, each burnished the
other’s legend, as all four of the movies they made together prove. She
made some good ones without Bogart, who died in 1957, including the
fizzy “How to Marry a Millionaire.”
But after the 1940s, as pneumatic blondes blew up and gender roles were
re-established, she didn’t often find the film roles that suited her
cool, steady gaze. The movies couldn’t see it, but she was born to go
quip to quip, curled lip to lip, with a man.
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