fivelessons:

‘She 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 while… 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.’

James Agee describing Lauren Bacall.

(via missavagardner)