Cinema

Lauren Bacall is my kind of woman. Well, I don't really know but if Humphrey Bogart, that epitomy of masculine verve liked her then she is probably good enough for me too. Actually with someone like Bacall, the main attraction is the ease with which she projects the characters she plays. She seems very intelligent and above all reasonable.

How an actress made herself known to an audience was simpler in the days of black and white films. The absence of colour meant that we saw more of the essence of the drama in the actions. The actors were not so much larger than life as truer to character. They were dramatic characters, heroes and heroines. There was no false modesty. They were strong, and romantic. They weren't complicated like the current crop of movie stars. Lauren Bacall was either in love or not and in those days loving went beyond pure feeling. She stood by her man. And naturally the man, for his part, adored her - totally.

The cinema is a world of projected light. It is a moving billboard. It broke with painterly conventions and depicted human character much larger than life. When there was Bacall or indeed Ingrid Bergman up there, the male heart pulpitated in awe of female power. We suddenly understood that the woman's place wasn't in the home, it was in the cinema, to make us feel good, to make us live vicariously but gladly so. Many an afternoon was lost in a reverie of romantic emotions. We went out of the dreary world of penny making into the imagined world where women like Lauren Bacall actually lived, not a hair out of place, beautifully dressed, shoulders straight, eyes smouldering. Men fell in love with this vision of female impeccability. I felt that she also had much courage, that come-what-may-I've-got-my-man kind of courage. I think men find female strength irresistible because we sense, through a chance to love a woman, that somehow our own heroism might also emerge. Brava!