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- <text>
- <title>
- (1940s) Lauren Bacall
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights
- PEOPLE
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- Lauren Bacall
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>(October 23, 1944)
- </p>
- <p> Lauren Bacall has cinema personality to burn, and she burns
- both ends against an unusually little middle. Her personality
- is compounded partly of percolated Davis, Garbo, West, Dietrich,
- Harlow and Glenda Farrell, but more than enough of it is
- completely new to the screen. She has a javelinlike vitality,
- a born dancer's eloquence in movement, a fierce female
- shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness. With these faculties,
- plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she
- manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate
- Hollywood has dreamed of in a long, long while.
- </p>
- <p> Her lines have been neatly tailored to her talents. They
- include such easy lines of cryptic folk poetry as "Was ya ever
- bit by a dead bee?" An even easier line, sure to bring down any
- decently vulgar house, is her comment on Bogart's second,
- emboldened kiss: "It's even better when you help." Besides good
- lines, there are good situations and songs for Newcomer Bacall.
- She does a wickedly good job of sizing up male prospects in a
- low bar, growls a louche song more suggestively than anyone in
- cinema has dared since Mae West in She Done Him Wrong (1933).</p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-