Best of the Rest intro
Plot Intro
Our many tens of readers may be wondering “where is the next Best Actress winner?” “Why have you deviated from our usual course?” “This is scandalous!”. Well, never fear, for we will carry on with the 1940s actresses very soon. But we thought we would celebrate some of the legendary Hollywood actresses who were sadly never recognised with an Oscar win. The only prerequisites are that they have never won Best Actress (despite possible nominations) and that they are dead. Not because we’re morbid but because they can never win it. Some may be names you’ve never heard of before, while some may be names that surprise you. Indeed, while Hepburn, Streep, Davis, Bergman, Taylor, Foster, Swank and McDormand have won multiple times, Garland, Bacall, Monroe, Russell, Garbo, Swanson and Stanwyck won none. Why? Were there times when they SHOULD have won? Were they even nominated? These questions we hope to answer on these occasional tangents into the vaults of cinema.
And we kick off with an immensely familiar Hollywood name…
Plot Intro
The Big Sleep: Private Detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is hired by an ailing old millionaire to sort out some gambling debts accumulated by his younger daughter. But the older daughter, Vivian (Lauren Bacall), thinks Marlowe has been hired to find her father’s mysteriously missing protege. A web of secrets and lies are about to be uncovered.
Dark Passage: Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) has been incarcerated in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. A woman named Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall) helps him to hide, change his face via plastic surgery, and find out who the true killer was…
Lauren Bacall is a big name in Hollywood. Born to Jewish parents in New Jersey, her real name was Betty Joan Perske. Bacall came from her mother’s Romanian maiden name, Bacal. She started her career in modelling, and worked with Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. Her modelling caught the attention of director Howard Hawkes’ wife, who recommended Bacall to her husband. Hawkes asked his secretary to find out more about Bacall as a potential candidate for his new movie, but the secretary apparently misunderstood and sent Bacall a ticket to Hollywood and arranged a full-blown audition. She got the role in To Have and Have Not alongside Humphrey Bogart and her career took off instantly.
Bacall became known for her husky, sultry voice but interestingly her natural voice was more high-pitched. It was on the advice of Howard Hawkes and his wife that she lower it through using a vocal coach, which gave Bacall one of her most distinctive and memorable features.
A pretty consistent career and a series of extremely popular films in which she starred with her then-husband, Humphrey Bogart, cemented her name solidly in cinematic history. And yet she never won an Oscar. As Doug says, she merited just one nomination for Best Supporting Actress despite ongoing popularity and esteem. Was there something wrong with her performances? Or are we putting too much emphasis on the Academy Awards as a standard of quality?
Judging by these two movies she certainly deserved some sort of recognition. She is a dominant screen presence, even in plots that are so contrived and bizarre that you end up laughing inappropriately rather than gasping. Feline features, a voice like a French horn, serene, controlled movements that show power but hide secrets. She’s very nuanced and knows how to handle an occasionally clunky script.
Dark Passage was the stronger of these two because it was evidently aware of its own daftness. It’s a melodramatic story but with a good pace and sincere acting.
The Big Sleep, however, took itself far too seriously. It also has a plot line with twists and turns being pummelled at you so fast, you barely have time to breathe. The relentless desire to surprise the audience also makes the plot so tight that much of it doesn’t make sense. One scene sees Bogart confront a man at an apartment. He finds that the man’s female associate and Bacall are there, hidden behind a curtain, then the younger sister turns up with a gun, then someone else turns up with a gun and kills the man Bogart came to see. Why are these other characters there? How do they know the other characters would be there? Why is Bogart making sassy reads rather than not asking these very relevant questions to help the audience? All I can assume is that the writers were making all this nonsense up as they went along.
These films are two out of four examples of Bacall and Bogart’s acting partnership and marriage. Despite their age difference, the two had a very successful 12-year marriage that ended with Bogart’s untimely death in 1957. During the 1950s the two became close friends with another screen duo, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Bacall shared Hepburn’s staunchly democratic sentiments. She protested against McCarthyism and aided various Democrat nominees during elections. She also intimated that, if you are a Republican, you have “a small mind”.
Her career remained varied across stage and screen, and she continued to work well into the new millennium. She died as late as 2014, one of the last surviving actresses from what is often called Hollywood’s Golden Age, just one month shy of her 90th birthday.
I would suggest that Bacall’s lack of Oscar recognition is because her roles in film noirs probably caused the Academy to turn its noses up at her. The Oscars often recognises character acting and portraying historical figures, while Bacall found her seductive, smooth-tongued niche and she wisely stuck to it. She was, however, given an honorary Academy Award at the Governor’s Awards in 2009. “About bloody time!” is what I assume she said.
Highlight
Dark Passage’s opening scenes, which are shown from Bogart’s point of view so that we don’t see his original face, are great fun. Campy, enthusiastic, impossible- it’s perfect escapism.
Lowlight
Various scenes in The Big Sleep put too much emphasis on sparky dialogue rather than plot cohesion. It’s still fun thanks to the relentless action, but totally uninvolving.
Mark
Dark Passage: 7/10
The Big Sleep: 3/10
Doug says...
We were originally planning to watch Lauren Bacall in just The Big Sleep but we had Dark Passage on DVD as well, so I’m going to talk about her in both, because Film Noir turns out to have very similar plots with very similar characterisations.
Bacall never won an Oscar, and only had one nomination - remarkably for her role in a Barbra Streisand vehicle in the ‘90s. That alone should show the stamina of her career. She also won two Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Musical - one of which was 1970’s Applause, the musical version of All About Eve which you can listen to the cast recording of on Spotify. In it, Bacall dazzles as Margo Channing, with a foghorn singing voice that is incredibly more-ish. I particularly recommend her singing ‘But Alive’ which is as dramatic and jaunty as any musical could achieve.
All this was ahead of her, as she stars in these black and white film noirs in the mid-1940s with her new lover Humphrey Bogart (26 years older than her). As a fresh-faced woman in her early 20s, she dominates the screen with an unusual, cat-like face and a deep husky voice. It’s hard to judge whether she’s a great actress at this point because she simply is sheer charisma - you can’t take your eyes off her when she’s on screen.
Personally I think she’s stronger in Dark Passage, playing a heroine with a grudge against the system, and an iron-clad will. She calmly navigates around the other characters and handles the obligatory ‘driving a car which is obviously stationery in a studio’ scenes with full commitment. She’s not a diva on screen but she’s stealing the scenes without you knowing it.
Equally in The Big Sleep, she’s gripping but the plot is so convoluted that I couldn’t keep track and stopped watching half way through. Film Noir is a bit daft at times, but it needs to cling on to some narrative understanding in order to work. Humphrey Bogart was nominated #1 actor of all time by an American Film Institute, but I’m really not sure how. He plays the same part in all the films I’ve ever seen, which feels a little paint by numbers after more than one viewing.
But anyway - it’s a surprise that Bacall didn’t ever win an Oscar, given that after watching two films of hers, I’m keen to see more. It’ll be interesting as we progress through the Best of the Rest list, to see how many others missed out on one of the ultimate prizes.
Highlight
Bacall as a different type of heroine to the norm (more subdued but steely) is intriguing. It’s a performance that brings both films to life.
Lowlight
Convoluted plots and dips into pure silliness mean that Film Noir as a whole often loses me.
Marks
Dark Passage: 6/10
The Big Sleep: 2/10
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