Lauren Bacall recently received one of those "lifetime achievement" awards, her first Oscar. She has had a fascinating career in show business, and as of this writing she is still working at 87.
She was nominated once for an Academy Award for the dreadful The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). She was quite good in it, but deservedly lost to Juliette Binoche for The English Patient.
To see her good movies, you have to go back to the 40s and 50s and with today's technology, you can!
To Have and Have Not (1944) was her first movie and it co-starred future husband Humphrey Bogart.
With a screenplay by William Faulkner, this story of a reluctant gun-runner and his hot babe still smokes.
Bogie and Baby (Mr. Bogart and Ms. Bacall) are on hand again for Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1946).
I know, I know. The story has holes you could drive a Hummer through, but who cares?
You can't stop watching this pair of legends and your toes might curl when you hear Baby ask Bogie, "You know how to whistle, don't you Rick? Just put your lips together and blow."
Wow!
Key Largo (1948) has Bacall and Bogart, plus Edward G. Robinson (Yeah, See!) and Oscar winning Claire Trevor.
It's the character-driven story of a bunch of innocents being held hostage by a gangster (Robinson, of course) during a hurricane. Really good!
Mr. Bogart is nowhere to be found in Young Man With A Horn (1950). This time it's Kirk Douglas as a compulsive trumpet player and Doris Day as his goody-goody girlfriend.
Ah, but Ms. Bacall steals the film as the bad girl!
In both Woman's World (1954) and Designing Woman (1957) Lauren Bacall is way ahead of the times as a tough career woman with a voice that can melt steel (and guys).
That's about it, though there are many more films. But Ms. Bacall then went on to Broadway where she had even more success.
She won several Tonys, including her wonderful role as Margo Channing in Applause (based on the movie All About Eve, but with Bette Davis, not Ms. Bacall).
In that show and many others, she used that deep contralto voice to great effect and she could sing up a storm!
All of the movies in this column are available on DVD, except, inexplicably, Woman's World.
All are suitable for all ages, factoring in the boredom quotient for the littlies.
Rusty Hammond has been writing the Mr. Movie column since 1996. It appears in several newspapers in North Carolina.
