Best of the Rest: Lauren Bacall in 'The Big Sleep' & 'Dark Passage' (1946/47)

Best of the Rest 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…

Paul says...

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

12. Vivien Leigh in 'Gone With the Wind' (1939)

Plot Intro

Girl (Vivien Leigh) meets boy (Clark Gable). Girl is spoilt daughter of Southern-state plantation owner. Boy is suave and debonair and calls out her bullshit. American Civil War breaks out. Girl loses wealth and status. Girl keeps encountering Boy. Girl married Boy. Boy leaves Girl. Girl decides that tomorrow is another day.

Paul says...

After Luise Rainer and Bette Davis dominated the late '30s Best Actresses with their double-wins, a new and upcoming actress ending the decade with their first win must have been pretty noteworthy. All the more noteworthy are the facts that she won for starring in one of the most expensive, most profitable and most gargantuan movies of all time, and for playing one of the most coveted roles. 

The Search for Scarlett O’Hara had the same buzz as the search for who would play Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. The novel Gone With the Wind, which charts the fall and survival of spoilt Southern Belle Scarlett during the American Civil War, was published in 1936 and was a monster hit, leading to a 4-hour adaptation being released merely 3 years later. While other roles were filled with relative ease, the role of Scarlett O’Hara proved more contentious. Over 1,400 total unknowns were interviewed and a multitude of famous names auditioned (tapes of these auditions still exist). It was eventually narrowed down to Paulette Goddard and Vivien Leigh. Goddard very nearly crossed the finish line first but the role went to Leigh due to controversy over Goddard’s marriage to Charlie Chaplin.

And the role projected Leigh to absolute stardom at just 26 years old. By then, she was already married to Herbert Leigh Holman and had a 6-year-old daughter with him. She had also begun an affair with the also-married Laurence Olivier. She had put herself forward for the role of Scarlett after reading the novel and stating that she had already cast herself. Like most actresses with a taste for ambition, she gained a reputation for being difficult and demanding although later historians have identified the fact that she was a chain smoker and suffered from Bipolar Disorder for most of her life. In fact, her Gone With the Wind co-star, Olivia De Havilland, has spoken out in Leigh’s defence.

Biography aside, Leigh’s Best Actress win is surely one of the easiest decisions the Academy ever made. Granted, she was up against four massive names at the time (Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Greta Garbo and Greer Garson) but she acts her socks off in this. It’s a big performance but she skilfully doesn’t take it too far. Even when she flounces about the huge set in massive dresses, Leigh gives Scarlett enough calculating looks, and makes the most of her moments of strength to create a character that’s exhaustingly manipulative and yet admirably resourceful. This is what makes Scarlett so enduring. She starts off truly awful, dangling proverbial carrots in front of idiotic suitors, dismissing her friends and throwing herself at a man who has very openly told her he’s not interested. But when the war destroys her family, home and lifestyle, she is the one to take charge over her pathetically dainty peers; she is the one that holds them up with her authority and refusal to lose. She is the ultimate anti-heroine, a very difficult role to get right, and Leigh totally pulls it off.

My opinion on the film hasn’t changed since we watched it for our Best Picture project. It’s a fiery, vibrant four hours, with more than enough happening to keep your attention for the whole time. It’s beautifully shot, with many scenes and moments gaining “Iconic” status. It is let down somewhat by a frantic second half where many plot elements are crammed in. The first half, which covers the war itself, has a more stable pace that allows the audience enough breathing space to process events. And while the film provided a (small) stepping stone for black actors to have more substantial, active roles, its presentation of black slaves is hugely problematic. They are all content in their social status and treated with familial warmth by their wealthier white owners- not the most realistic depiction of this time period. Gone With the Wind represents that tricky duality between being progressive but also regressive. This is further exemplified by the Oscar ceremony, in which co-star Hattie McDaniel became the first black person to win an Oscar, but had to sit at the back on a table away from the others due to the venue’s “No Coloureds” rule.

After Gone With the Wind put her to the top of Box Office, Leigh and Laurence Olivier divorced their respective first spouses and tied the knot in 1940. They were married for 20 years, and were a Hollywood power couple in the same vein as Burton and Taylor, Pitt and Jolie, Krasinski and Blunt. But we will leave Vivien Leigh there for now. We’ll see her again when she won her second Best Actress Oscar in 1951, for a remarkably similar yet subtly different role.

Highlight

Hattie McDaniel’s heart-breaking “ascending the stairs” scene with Olivia de Havilland towards the end of the film always brings a lump to my throat. It explains how McDaniels managed to nab Best Supporting Actress away from de Havilland, despite the level of racism that was rife in the US at the time. 

Lowlight

The rose-tinted vision of black slaves is a major drawback and should certainly be acknowledged.

Mark

9/10

Doug says...

Vivien Leigh burst onto the scene, fresh and snarling with cat-like eyes and charisma for days. In Gone With The Wind, she pins down the central role in a sprawling, chaotic four hour mess that is at times both inspired and turgid. 

If this is a verbose introduction, then it is only too fitting. Leigh excels in a wordy, over-the-top role in a film that doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘underplayed’. The dresses are huge, the gallantry even bigger, and as we write at a time of Black Lives Matter protests, the casual sweeping over of slavery is the biggest shadow over it all. 

It’s worse in the book, of course. Slaves are always represented as house slaves who adore their families and stand by them through thick and thin. The field slaves are barely seen, except for one halcyon lit frame in the opening credits as they look healthy and contented, cotton-picking in the summer. Hardly accurate. Yet it provided an opportunity for actress Hattie McDaniels to shine, and subsequently become the first Black winner of an acting Oscar. 

This aside, the story itself is ludicrous yet compelling. What makes it better than many other novels that would feature this time, is the presenting of Scarlett O’Hara as the anti-heroine, a character you at first despise and then come to support for her sheer refusal to submit to the crushing circumstances in which she finds herself. Scarlett goes from selfish, entitled Southern Belle, to entrepreneur, to cotton picker, to rich wife and back again. It’s a whirligig ride and we stay with her largely because of Leigh’s compelling performance. It’s an exceptional one, holding a massive film together despite being just 26 years old. 

The film is noticeable mainly for its titanic set-pieces - the streets full of wounded soldiers after battle, Scarlett digging for vegetables in the grounds of her ruined mansions, the Southern belles all napping before the evening dancing and the burning of Atlanta. They are extraordinary and full of vibrancy and drama. But the smaller scenes too hold their own, largely because of the quality of Leigh and her scene partner Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. It’s a great cast full of excellent performances, and so despite the rushed second half, it remains a classic. 

Highlight

Vivien Leigh encapsulates the spoilt yet steely Scarlett, with all her frills, fiddle-dee-dees and more. It’s a fantastic performance. 

Lowlight

It’s more a fault of the novel, but having Black slaves not wanting to be freed doesn’t really sit well with a modern audience. 

Marks

8/10

11. Bette Davis in 'Jezebel' (1938)

Plot Intro

Julie Marsden (Bette Davis) is an impulsive, headstrong Southern Belle in New Orleans, mid-1800s. She’s engaged to austere but handsome businessman Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda). When Dillard irritates her by missing a meeting, Julie decides to get revenge by wearing the whorish colour of red to a prestigious ball, rather than virginal white. Her actions leave her socially ostracised and Dillard furiously breaks off the marriage. But as time passes and a pandemic (how ironic) hits New Orleans, Julie tries to find a way to win back the life she had.

Doug says...

This is, rather guttingly, our last brush with Bette Davis in this project. I’m going to run over the film pretty quickly because I want to discuss Davis, labelled one of the greatest actresses of all time by the American Film Institute, second only to Katharine Hepburn. 

The film is a bit shoddy, and is very much a weak blueprint of Gone With The Wind, released a year later and for which Davis was a popular choice for the main role (losing out as she did to Vivien Leigh). It’s full of big skirts and is a hair’s breadth away from a ‘fiddle dee dee’. The plot also abruptly switches halfway through - from torrid romance to disaster movie - as suddenly everyone is desperately trying not to catch and die from Yellow Fever. It’s a slight jolt writing this in the middle - as we are - of the global Coronavirus pandemic, but it actually helped me understand the desperation portrayed on screen. Faye Bainter as Davis’ aunt is excellent (and won Best Supporting Actress) and it’s an enjoyable if ultimately unbelievable film. 

But Bette Davis is wonderful. The thing that I missed - the Davis thing - from her first Best Picture win, is here. It’s not fully present but it is there, an unfurling of her astonishing screen presence, her willingness to be unattractive or unpleasant, and ultimately magnetic. I’m delighted because my favourite thing about Davis is that she doesn’t let anyone else have the screen. It’s hers. 

One of Davis’ last ever acting roles was in 1986’s Murder with Mirrors, an adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel and opposite the also-great actress Helen Hayes in her last ever role. Davis had had a stroke and was clearly struggling, the left side of her mouth downturned. She is frequently sitting during the filming and the bombastic fire of her greatest roles is completely absent. It’s quite a flat performance. But during one scene, as her character finds out the treachery of the people around her, she stretches out a hand to her friend in sorrow, and suddenly the full force of her sheer talent captivates you. Even then - shrivelled, damaged and only three years before her death - Bette Davis retained the magic of a great Hollywood actress.

For me her greatest moment is in 1950’s All About Eve, where at the age of 42, she bounds around the stage with flair and fire, combining the camp with the emotional till you are almost breathless. No one else can deliver the line ‘fasten your seatbelts’ like Davis. It was - to my mind - criminal that she didn’t win a third Oscar for it. But Davis wasn’t proud and would famously take any role. She cared most that she was working. Search her name on Amazon Prime and you’ll see a host of films come up, many that you’ve never heard of. We’ve watched a few and some of them are diabolical - or they would be except for Davis at the heart of it, working her arse off to entertain and amuse - and always succeeding. 

She was also a consummate professional. When working on Death on the Nile in her 70s, she was still always - as she was all her career - the first one on set, the first one in hair and make up and the first one to be line perfect. Co-star and fellow legend Angela Lansbury said that she felt the reason Davis liked her was that she took it as seriously, and turned up at the same time. It mattered, to Davis, that everyone was there to work.

I am genuinely sad that we won’t get to go on the same journey in this project that we will with Katharine Hepburn, checking in with her at various points along the way. But I still have a host of her films to discover independently - hugely well regarded ones like Now, Voyager, The Little Foxes and The Whales of August. 

What would Bette Davis say, I wonder, if she were alive now and saw us excitedly rhapsodising over the joys of her back catalogue? I rather suspect she would sneer, stub out a cigarette, and ask ‘what’s next?’ 

Highlight 

Bette Davis getting into her talent. Joy. 

Lowlight

The sudden switch of the film to being all about Yellow Fever. 

Mark 

8/10

Paul says...

Movie nerds and homosexuals alike may have noticed the strong similarities between this and next week’s Best Actress winning movie, Gone With the Wind. Both are set in the slave-loving, plantation-dwelling South, both feature a young, spoilt heroine who keeps screwing up her life (although Julie is far less heroic and strong-minded as Scarlet O’Hara) and both feature a turgid love story against a dramatic historical backdrop. 

The fact that you’ve never heard of Jezebel (I’m assuming) correctly implies that it’s a sub-par Gone With the Wind. It’s shorter, simpler and, quite frankly, sillier. It starts off very strong, with Davis giving a more controlled performance than she did in her first Best Actress movie (admittedly, she’s playing a more controlled character), and I really enjoyed the way as simple an action as wearing red ends up becoming the crux of the tale. The scene at the ball is magnificently done with turning heads, tutting of lips and glares thrown about, giving a sense that what seemed like a simple prank has escalated beyond control. It doesn’t feel daft at all, it’s intensely convincing. And Davis does a superb job of showing Julie go from triumph to discomfort, while Fonda’s masochistic fury also hits hard.

Jezebel doesn’t manage to maintain this liveliness and the pace slows a lot throughout the second half before culminating in a climax that wasn’t very convincing at all. But it’s helped along by the sort of soaring orchestral music and huge costumes, scenery and crowd scenes that keep most epics galvanised. Plus a lovely performance from Faye Bainter as Julie’s moralistic Aunt, who won Best Supporting Actress for this role. It’s far stronger than Davis’ first Best Actress win, but Gone With the Wind is about to crush it a year later.

Incidentally, Davis got this role as compensation for not getting the role of Scarlet. Although she was never seriously considered, she was the number one actress of the year and a firm favourite among audiences for such a coveted role. Her career remained stable throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s but as time went on even Davis admitted that balancing her turbulent personal life with her perfectionist, hard-working nature in her professional life was a struggle. Throughout the 50s, her films became less successful. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was supposed to be her comeback and she did garner another Best Actress nomination for it, but she never quite gained the same success as in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

But, tough and tenacious as ever, she kept going, usually playing either the lead in sub-standard thrillers (I recommend Dead Ringer, which is good for a laugh) or supporting parts in other movies, such as the successful Death on the Nile. Davis is admirable in that, even in her mature years, she would unashamedly take a role so that she could work and support herself. 

Her rivalry with Joan Crawford is much speculated on. Although the two actresses differ massively in looks and acting style, they seemed to attract very similar roles. They also suffered from their respective daughters both writing “tell-all” memoirs that condemned them as abusive. The veracity of Crawford’s (called Mommy Dearest) has divided many (and we’ll deal with that in more detail when Crawford wins her Best Actress Oscar in the ‘40s). Davis’ (called My Mother’s Keeper), meanwhile, is widely condemned as false. 

Davis worked almost right up to her dying day, despite years of ill health. She died from breast cancer in 1989, and her tombstone reads “She did it the hard way”. 

Highlight

The ballroom scene is tense and excruciating. Drama is better when everyone’s wearing mid-nineteenth century gowns.

Lowlight

A lengthy scene leading up to Julie inadvertently instigating a duel. It goes on so long that the suspense is lost. 

Mark

8/10