In By Myself, Lauren Bacall’s first memoir, the actress wrote, “No one has ever written a romance better than [Humphrey Bogart and I] lived it.” Even if their film characters’ liaisons paled in comparison to their real-life affair, the repartee in Bogie/Bacall classics like Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not isn’t too shabby. Which is why all eight of UCSB’s Arts & Lectures summer films at the Courthouse are Bogie and Bacall films that include both solo and costarring works.
Now in its seventh season, the Free Summer Cinema series at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse Sunken Garden has solidified itself as a wildly popular tradition. Each year, the roster highlights different flavors of classic films, but this is the first time the content has been centered on who stars in the movie. “We look back at classic films, but we haven’t done a series that was focused on actors, per se,” said Roman Baratiak, whose UCSB Arts & Lectures team — in a joint-collaboration with the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission, Santa Barbara County Park Foundation, and the Community Services Department of Santa Barbara County — puts on the event. “So instead of [focusing on] a male or female actor, we chose [Bogie and Bacall], who were married and did four films together.”
Along with Casablanca — which features only Bogart — this series offers several time-honored Bogie/Bacall collaborations. Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not — the couple’s first pairing, and the one in which smoky-voiced Lauren Bacall utters one of her most famous lines: “You know how to whistle ... just put your lips together and blow” — plays on Wednesday, July 20, and Friday, July 22. Viewers can catch another sultry Bogie/Bacall vehicle, The Big Sleep, on Wednesday, July 27, and Friday, July 29.