Lauren Bacall- Page 4

[bobs3]

Posted: 9/19/12 at 10:33pm

Bacall also did an tv movie with Gregory Peck called "The Portait", in which she played Peck's wife and Cecilia Peck (Gregory's daughter) played their onscreen daughter.

Updated On: 9/19/12 at 10:33 PM

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 9/20/12 at 10:21pm

SOMEBODY OWES ME AN APOLOGY!

Now let me start by saying I like a good-bad 1950s' melodrama as much as the next person! HOME FROM THE HILL is sublime. GIANT even.

And I admit I missed some of the dialogue of WRITTEN because (a) my husband was howling with laughter all through it, and (b) Robert Stack changed his accent with every new line, all the while slurring his words.

But sensible Lauren Bacall meets the big boss' son and flies off to Miami with him within the hour? And then marries him 18 hours after she met him, all of which pleases Big Daddy no end because it shows that Sonny is finally "settling down"? Huh? Marrying a girl you just met is a sign of stability?

And then--SPOILER ALERT--the entire plot turns on Robert Stack believing he is sterile when he really is not? Ay, caramba!

Frankly, I think Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall come off much better than the Oscar nominees. And Bacall's hair is beautiful: her constant playing with it is the highlight of the picture. Oh, that and the stylish interior decor for which Sirk is justly famous.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 9/20/12 at 10:45pm

Sigh, you utterly miss the Sirkian, melodramatic magic of the film. *shakes head*. I can't argue any of your points, and yet that's what makes it so great. Like Imitation of Life or the far more ridiculous Magnifient Obsession, it somehow--for me--borders completely this wonderful line between so bad it's good and honestly brilliant. I mean how he films Malone's ridiculous/sublime jazz dance leading to her father's heartattack. Movie Magic.

[MrMidwest]

Posted: 9/20/12 at 11:52pm

Roger Ebert on Written on the Wind

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 9/21/12 at 12:18am

That's a fantastic piece by Ebert. One objection--I don't really fully buy into the common held current belief that Sirk was really doing satire. I think there's an ELEMENT of truth to this--ie as Ebert explains all the obvious artificiality--even for the time when movies seemed (to our modern eyes) more artificial. But I think he also took them deadly seriously at the same time. But Ebert alludes to this when he admits it can be enjoyed on different levels.

(I also think his comment about Inge and Williams is a bit too glib even if there is truth that their plots--Williams' in particular--could be, frankly, rather insane potboilers and it is true they hold up because of the poetry inthe language but I think there's a different element at play as well).

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 9/21/12 at 12:19am

I do especially like this quote, though: "To appreciate the trashiness of ``Written on the Wind' is not to condescend to it. To a greater degree than we realize, our lives and decisions are formed by pop cliches and conventions. Films that exaggerate our fantasies help us to see them--to be amused by them, and by ourselves. They clear the air"

And yes, when Ifirst saw Written, all I could think of was how much it must have inspired Dallas, as well as early Dynasty (the pre Joan Collins season when it aspired to be a serious drama involving oil tycoons).

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 9/21/12 at 6:19am

I hate to say, how much I like Mario Catone's impersonation, while reading Lauren Bacall's memoirs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VlV0uXCksM

[MrMidwest]

Posted: 9/21/12 at 7:46am

I don't really agree with Ebert about Tennesee, either.

An interesting take on another Sirk film:

"Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes made it cool to reference Douglas Sirk. But if the esteemed Andrew Sarris hadn't championed the incisiveness of the German-born director's dark humor inside the pages of Film Culture, there's no telling if Sirk's rank as one of cinema's premiere auteurist heroes would be as steadfast as it is today. Sirk's journey to wide critical acceptance has fascinatingly mirrored the very biting irony of his distinctly feminine melodramas. These misunderstood masterpieces (among them All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life) were often dismissed as salient, weepy "women's pictures" by critics (no doubt the same ones who easily embraced the more masculine melodramas of Vittorio de Sica, Nicholas Ray, and Sam Fuller) too afraid or unwilling to look beneath their complex surfaces."

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/imitation-of-life/644

[strummergirl]

Posted: 9/21/12 at 7:49am

I love Robert Stack. I would somehow watch those really old movies where he played somebody unstable on TCM or AMC (when they also played the old movies to the point they had a Doris Day picture a day, guaranteed) then tune into a re-run of Unsolved Mysteries where he is the protective, sane, narrator when I was kid and already, I admired the range.

On Sirk doing "satire". I always thought he was toying with societal norms. There was something about the German expat directors in the post-war but Sirk went into a genre befitting of his talents rather than the Stanley Kramer path. His remake of Imitation of Life flipped the roles of importance by showcasing the black maid mother and her self-loathing light-skinned daughter than the privileged white woman with a nice boyfriend who gets her daughter jealous- at least compared to the original film. He managed to do it with Lana Turner and Sandra Dee in the latter roles, no less. I definitely thought he meant to subvert and that he also took the issues very seriously hence the urgency to subvert those issues. The ending to Imitation of Life is still ridiculously over the top but in a a nice kind of ridiculous with the focus shifted to the African-American story.

But often I think sometimes it depended on the actor. I think some performers knew what they were doing in that film and others not so much. Honestly, I have changed my opinion on which performers may have known or who did not- and quality of performance has nothing to do with it.

I remember watching WRITTEN ON THE WIND on TCM and Robert Osborne had Molly Haskell with him to introduce the program as part of The Essentials series. It was almost as if somebody had to twist Osborne's arm to agree to do this because he did not come off a Sirk fan in the least. Haskell, however, did. Maybe it was her southern roots but she loved the soapy trashiness of it all and wore it like a badge of honor. Osborne thought Stack and Malone were ridiculous, Haskell loved them. Osborne admitted as much to liking Bacall and Hudson in the picture, Haskell essentially said, 'Whatever, not as interesting as Stack and Malone chewing up the scenery and spitting it all out'. But I do think Bacall was very good. Stack did forewarn her that he was going to be acting insane on and off screen and she definitely looked scared of him.

But to bring this back to Betty, I love Seth Rudetsky's deconstruction of the low octave Betty goes with in "Hurry Back". To quote Marc Kudisch, one of the great baritones of the '70s.


Betty, B for Bass Updated On: 9/21/12 at 07:49 AM

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 9/21/12 at 8:52pm

Just to be clear, the original POSEIDON ADVENTURE remains one of my favorite movies: I am not a snob when it comes to improbable melodramas.

But good-bad melodrama has its own sort of verisimilitude. Maria does not marry Captain Von Trapp on her first day in his home. Yes, the plot does involve a misunderstanding (when Maria sees the Captain dance with the Baroness and thinks they are in love), but it is resolved and the entire climax doesn't hinge on it.

Yes, I recognize that the Sirk decor and photography are striking. But to me, a film is more than a photo montage.

And while grad students may write essays on Bacall's instant capitulation and marriage to the drunken, good-for-nothing but very rich, playboy, detailing how the sensible woman's choice is a reflection on women's roles in the 1950s and the pressure on even the most capable to achieve a secure home and family, I still say the emperor has no clothes. (Thus showing my "lack of sophistication" according to the writer of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, a bad melodrama that was at least amusing.)

Still, Bacall shows very well why she was a film star. And since this is her thread, it was worth watching WRITTEN ON THE WIND for that, I suppose.

Updated On: 9/21/12 at 08:52 PM

[MrMidwest]

Posted: 9/21/12 at 9:14pm

I think Bacall did the film mostly because of Rock. I saw a BBC Scene by Scene interview with her from the 90s where the host tried to engage her about the alleged deeper meaning of the film and she just wasn't really buying it.

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 9/21/12 at 9:33pm

I'm not defending the film, but with very rare exceptions, actors are not reliable sources on things like "themes" and "underlying meanings". Subtext, yes, but good actors have to see their roles largely through the eyes of their characters while ignoring overall "meanings".

I wonder why Rock did the film? He didn't really have much to do in it.

(ETA I did love one of Bacall's lines to Malone: "Pardon me. I'm brushing you out of my hair." It was a perfect "Lauren Bacall" line.



Updated On: 9/21/12 at 09:33 PM

[MrMidwest]

Posted: 9/21/12 at 9:49pm

"How many movies evoke the period in which they were made and yet still look both fresh and modern as well? This seems like one of the quintessential films of the '50s: a high-powered Texas oil-family drama, detailing the mis-matches between the spoiled and variously bent children of the family and the relatively 'normal' outsiders. Sirk plays it as a conspicuously fierce critique of a particular sector of American society, the disintegrating middle class, but one in which all the sympathy goes to the 'lost' children rather than to the straights. The acting is dynamite, the melodrama is compulsive, the photography, lighting, and design share a bold disregard for realism. It's not an old movie; it's a film for the future."

http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/64835/written-on-the-wind.html

[Will42]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 4:55am

From Wikipedia:

Written on the Wind was the sixth of eight films Douglas Sirk made with Rock Hudson, and the most successful. Hudson, Malone, and Robert Stack worked so well together that the director reunited them for The Tarnished Angels (195.
Lauren Bacall, whose film career was floundering, accepted the relatively non-flashy role of Lucy Moore at the behest of her husband Humphrey Bogart.

[bobs3]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 11:20am

WRITTEN ON THE WIND is a dated but very good film. I've seen it several times on TCM. Dorothy Malone steals the entire movie. She should have become a star after that movie. Whatever happened to her career?

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 1:11pm

Strummergirl, as usual, you explained the satire much better than I did--and I can agree with that definition as used in the film.

Gaveston--I guess maybe it helped that I first saw it when I was 12 and at the peak of my love of All My Children (not that ever left me). I just find it fantastic--funny, yes but also moving. *shrug*

Bobs, Dorothy anchored Peyton Place when it was a nightime soap (the first!) for a long time. I'm about half way through the series, and she's amazing in it. She apparently took issue with the "racy" subject matter of Written and was never comfortable in the role. I believe (but could be wrong) she largely retired from acting after PP, though she did return for the awful Dynasty-ish attempt at a reboot they did in the 80s.

[Will42]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 1:31pm

According to IMDb Dorothy Malone retired in 1992 after appearing in Basic Instinct.

[bobs3]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 1:36pm

Which character did she play in BASIC INSTINCT?

[Will42]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 1:45pm

Murderess and Catherine Tramell's friend Hazel Dobkins.

[bobs3]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 1:54pm

Was she the one who lived with Catherine and it was sort of subtly implied that they were lovers (or least had some sort of sexual relationship)?

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 1:55pm

Oh wow, I just bought Basic Instinct and didn't recognize her at all (that seems odd after her comments on Written being too sexual...)

[MrMidwest]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 2:00pm

For the 5 people who haven't seen it:
1973 Applause telecast

[sanfrankid1]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 3:28pm

Saw her in Cactus Flower...stage doored it and didn't see her but met Brenda Vaccaro and she was very nice and put her cigarette down to sign my program.

Applause in London and Sweet Bird of Youth in London.Oh what wonderful
Nostalgia....

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 3:45pm

So as I asked above--how was she in Sweet Bird?

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 9/22/12 at 3:49pm

I have often wondered if there was some reason Applause was turned into a *TV movie*, and still with Lauren.