3 CHEERS FOR BACALL

SPOILER ALERT: DON'T READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN EPISODE 7, SEASON 6 OF "THE SOPRANOS."

I've always had a lot of respect for Lauren Bacall.

Well, we movie geeks can't quite get it out of our heads that she was the last Mrs. Humphrey Bogart, and for that we hold her in a certain amount of awe.

But Bacall has always given fine performances, always teetered on the fine line between beauty and brash. And once the beauty faded, there was still plenty of brash to go around.

Those key early performances, the ones with Bogie, are easy to lob kudos at: "To Have and to Have Not," "The Big Sleep," "Dark Passage," "Key Largo."

Permit me to recommend some under-the-radar Bacall performances: the wary, sympathetic landlady in John Wayne's swan song "The Shootist" (1976); an unbalanced woman in the sometimes nightmarish made-in-England chick flick "Innocent Victim" (1989); the gullible, needy title heiress in "Too Rich: The Secret Life of Doris Duke" (1999).

But Bacall's place in my heart was sealed in Episode 7, Season 6, of "The Sopranos" (which premiered two weeks back), in which she played herself. As a couple of goons grab her basket of swag, Bacall shouts, "Get the (expletive) away from me!" They bust her in the jaw. She hits pavement. "My (expletive) arm!" she screams. Bacall sounds at ease with the language.

The old girl took one for the cause. Never mind that her late hubbie was one of the Original Gangsters (do I have to name them? Robinson, Cagney, Raft, Bogart) -- a group "The Sopranos" owes much to. Bacall has dealt with these kinds of characters before. And prevailed.