“The Big Sleep” (1946)
Having been hailed by critics as the greatest thing since sexy, sultry, seductive sliced bread for her debut “To Have and Have Not” Bacall was promptly knocked off her pedestal by those same critics who savaged her followup “Confidential Agent.” Based on the Graham Greene novel and co-starring Charles Boyer, it’s a bit dull but hardly deserves the disapprobation heaped on it. Still, Bacall and Warner Brothers went back to the original template for her third film, reteaming her with now-husband Bogart and director Howard Hawks for this adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel. But the attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle for once actually paid off, as “The Big Sleep” is arguably the best film Bacall ever starred in —famously overplotted (Chandler himself reportedly didn’t know who killed the chauffeur, which forms a major plot point), it’s really an exercise in mood and charisma as Bogart definitively portrays Philip Marlowe, and Bacall sets the template for the ambiguous femme who may or may not be fatale. It’s gorgeously photographed, immensely melodramatic and ludicrously enjoyable, and Bacall has never been more coolly alluring than here, juggling divided loyalties, false confessions and family secrets with a hair never out of place. And how much do we love the handholding/glove rebuff that happens so casually below at 45s in? A lot.
“Key Largo” (1948)
The fourth and final Bogart/Bacall onscreen collaboration (their third, “Dark Passage” isn’t bad but is definitely the least of the quartet) “Key Largo” saw Bacall work for the first time with Bogart’s favorite director and close friend John Huston —they’d just wrapped “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” together. The film is a very enjoyable slice of late ’40s noir, given an unusually wet and humid vibe for the genre by being set in the Florida Keys, shot largely during a hurricane It’s also more of an ensemble piece than Bacall had experienced at the time: The film also stars Edward G Robinson as the gangster who holes up in Bacall’s hotel to wait out the storm, and Claire Trevor as his abused, alcoholic girlfriend. It’s perhaps the least developed role for Bacall of her four with Bogie (it was Trevor who got the showy part and claimed a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for it), but it’s an interesting thought experiment to imagine just how much poorer the film would have been with anyone else in that role. Despite being unusually relegated to the role of the good-girl love interest as the hotel owner/widow looking after her ailing father, Bacall brings an edge of ambivalence and independence to the role that makes her character much more interesting than was written, and much more a real foil for Bogart’s disillusioned soldier. An early riff on the home-invasion thriller, the film is really a crackling study in the dynamics of cabin fever, all sidelong glances and unspoken currents of tension and desire. Oh yes! And charged incidents of hair stroking.
“Young Man with a Horn” (1950)
Despite the now rather unfortunate title, this film from “Casablanca” director Michael Curtiz may be the closest Bacall’s back catalog has to a truly overlooked gem. A melodramatic music-based film co-starring Kirk Douglas and Doris Day and loosely based on the life of jazz cornetist Bix Biederbecke, it pits Bacall against rising star Day first as friends, and then as love rivals and polar opposites. Fresh-faced and supportive Day is Jo, the singer with a band which Douglas’ Rick Martin joins, but then leaves because he wants to play his own way. Later Jo introduces Rick to Bacall’s Amy, a self-professed intellectual studying to be a psychiatrist who lives the kind of sophisticated, wealthy lifestyle that Rick aspires to and who embodies a kind of sexy, self-assured, worldly womanhood that the lovelorn Jo cannot compete with. Despite the film clearly setting Bacall up as the villain, a seductress tempting Rick away from Jo’s pure-hearted love and heavily hinted to be a lesbian, Bacall invests her with a dignity and that trademark intelligence that makes us read far more depth into the character than we probably otherwise would. In fact, despite the streak of potential amorality that ran through a lot of her characters to this point, Bacall had so far really only played women who turned out to be “good,” so this is a great early example of something else from the actress: the woman who gets her man but turns out not to deserve him after all.