Lauren Bacall named the greatest director of all time: “Just an amazing man”
The American Film Institute knew what they were doing when they crowned Lauren Bacall as the 20th-greatest film star of Hollywood‘s Golden Age. She starred in a slew of classics, including the noir To Have and Not Have, the romantic comedy How to Marry A Millionaire, and Kirk Douglas’ southern gothic Written on the Wind.
But beyond her prowess as an actor on screen and on stage, Bacall will also be fondly remembered as Humphrey Bogart’s long-time wedded partner. Bogart, who is arguably one of the greatest actors of classical Hollywood, having starred in films like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, to name a few, first met and worked alongside his last wife in Howard Hawks’ romantic war drama To Have and Not Have.
A romantic partnership between stalwarts of Bacall and Bogart’s stature meant an inner circle of friends and colleagues also of the highest intellectual and creative order. In a conversation with The Hollywood Interview, Bacall recalled being on set with Bogart for his 1951 adventure film The African Queen. Directed by John Huston, the film starred Bogart opposite the legendary Katherine Hepburn, as a grieving missionary who gets swept up in a whirlwind romance with Bogart in the midst of the Great War. While there were plenty of tarantulas to avoid in Africa during their filming, Bacall fondly remembered her memories of Huston from those days.
“John Huston was to me, a genius. I thought he was the best director of all,” she reminisced.
Son of actor Walter Huston, John Huston spent his early youth training as a painter in Paris. He soon moved to Mexico, where he began writing short stories, before shifting to Los Angeles, where he started his long career as a screenwriter and director. He won his first Academy Award for writing and directing the neo-western classic The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Shot extensively on location, the film follows the story of two downtrodden men searching for gold in Mexico and delves into Huston’s usual narrative themes of alienation, despondency and class isolation. This visual language and recurring thematic choice led Ian Freer to label Huston as the Ernest Hemingway of the cinematic medium. “He always chose subjects that weren’t what you would think of as ‘commercial’. He did things that were interesting and fascinating,” shares Bacall regarding the work of her favourite director.
Beginning with The Maltese Falcon in 1941, Bogart and Huston collaborated on six films, excluding Bogart’s 1941 High Sierra, for which Huston wrote the screenplay. “He and Bogie were really close pals,” Bacall shared. “Anytime he made a movie, he wanted Bogie in it, and Bogie followed him blindly. Although John was not known for choosing locations that were comfortable, Bogie would go along with him in a second,” she adds. The African Queen was Huston and Bogart’s fifth film together.
Later in his career, John Huston also took on acting roles, earning widespread critical acclaim for his performances in films like Otto Preminger’s 1963 The Cardinal—for which he received an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’—and Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic Chinatown. Lauren Bacall summed him up perfectly: “How rare a thing is it to have someone like John, with a brilliant mind, who is a great director, amazing actor, a wonderful writer, and unusual, and then have him be wonderful company as well? Unpredictable, but always interesting. Just an amazing man.”
