Though the public response to Scott was generally favorable during the Paramount years, the film critics were less so, repeatedly making unfavorable comparisons to Lauren Bacall and Tallulah Bankhead, beginning with Bob Thomas' March 1945 comment about her screen test: "Her throaty voice may well make Lauren Bacall sound like a mezzo soprano." When the most prominent critic of the era, Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times", gave a bad review of "You Came Along" (1945), Scott's film debut, she recalled: "Being very young and naïve at the time, I didn't know you weren't supposed to do such things, so I called him up and complained. I told him how hard everyone worked to make such a beautiful movie, and I couldn't understand how he could be so cruel. I must say he took it awfully well, and was very kind to me." Nonetheless, in his review of "I Walk Alone" (1948), he stated: "As the torch singer ... Lizabeth Scott has no more personality than a model in the window of a department store." He also wrote of "a frighteningly grotesque Lizabeth Scott, who is supposed to represent a cabaret singer" in "Dark City" (1950).