One of Lauren Bacall's most memorable roles was her first one, next to Humphrey Bogart on the film "To Have and Have Not," playing femme fatale Marie "Slim" Browning.
Directed by Howard Hawks, movie fans and film critics alike were mostly stunned to see the 19-year-old Bacall hold her own with a screen legend like Humphrey Bogart. The film led to additional movies between the two — and a marriage.
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Here are eight quotes about the iconic role:
1. "Lauren Bacall has cinema personality to burn … a javelin-like vitality, a born dancer's eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness." - Film critic James Agee,
according to Turner Classic Movies.
2. "Lauren Bacall's hypnotic performance opposite her soon-to-be-husband encompasses one of the most iconic movie lines in the history of cinema, a line that all classic movie aficionados know by heart." -
According to Greatestmovies.org.
3. "When (Bacall) opened her mouth –— taking a long drag on a cigarette while locking Humphrey Bogart in her gaze –— she staked a claim on the screen and made an immortal Hollywood debut. But, in 1944, at the exquisitely tender age of 19, she was also projecting an indelible screen persona: that of the tough, quick-witted American woman who could fight the good fight alongside her man,"
wrote Manohla Dargis in The New York Times.
4. "The scenes between Bogart and Bacall are so dazzlingly about attraction and sex that they encapsulate the whole magic of movies," wrote Douglas Pratt in The Hollywood Reporte,
as reported by Rotten Tomatoes.
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5. "Watch the scene in which she asks Humphrey Bogart for a match in her deep drawl, glances at him with quiet amusement and lights her cigarette with maddening slowness before strolling out of his room. It's easy to imagine that it's Ms. Bacall who is the sophisticated, seen-it-all veteran, while the 44-year-old Bogie is the nervous newcomer,"
according to The Economist.
6. "But as much a Bacall trademark as the look she gave him was her voice, kept at a low register at Hawks' direction throughout the film. It gave the young actress a seductive worldliness that was never so evident as when she delivered one of the most famous lines in movie history to Bogart,"
wrote Dennis McLellan the the Los Angeles Times.
7. "What Bacall brought to that film wasn't so uncommon a decade earlier in Hollywood, in the pre-Production Code enforcement era of assertive women and, even today, startling sensuality,"
wrote Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune.
8. "The movie shaped her public identity: a woman as sexually confident as she was formidable, or, in Bogart’s words, 'steel with curves,"
wrote Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post.
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