“The Big Sleep” - Howard Hawks (1946)

The Big Sleep (1946) is a famous film noir directed by Howard Hawks – in fact some people think it is the greatest of all films noir [1,2,3,4,5,6].  It is based on famous detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), which featured Chandler’s favorite fictional protagonist, private detective Philip Marlowe.  In Hawks’s film version here, Marlowe is played by Humphrey Bogart, and this was one of the factors that made this film noir so popular – it turned out to be one of Bogart’s more famous roles.  Another factor in the film’s popularity was the romantic pairing of Bogart (aged 44) with Lauren Bacall (aged 20), a combo that had already achieved significant traction with the public from Hawks’s earlier To Have and Have Not (1944).  “Bogie and Bacall” were coupled offscreen, too, and they got married during this period.

Despite the fame of this film, though, there are aspects of it that make the work problematical.  For one thing, the plot of The Big Sleep (both that of the film and the novel) is so convoluted that most viewers can’t keep track of it.  This is partly a consequence of Chandler’s practice of basing each of his novels on several of his earlier-published short stories, each of which had its own plot.  And anyway, plot was less important for Chandler than atmosphere and characterization.  It seems that he wanted more to create a sense of tension rather than to tell a story.  So the task was considerable for the esteemed screenwriters who worked on the film:

• William Faulkner, a novelist and short story writer who won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature,
• Leigh Brackett, who later scripted another famous film noir based on a Raymond Chandler novel, The Long Goodbye (1973), and
• Jules Furthman, a prolific screenwriter whose vast repertoire includes the  scripting of seven of Josef von Sternberg’s films.
  

Not only did Faulkner, Brackett, and Furthman need to tone down the explicit sexuality (including homosexuality) in Chandler’s original account, they also had to understand and try to make some sense of Chandler’s tangled plot in the novel.  One notable example of this difficulty occurred during the shooting of the film when Bogart and Hawks wanted to know who committed one of the seven key murders in the film [5].  That is, was Sternwood’s chauffeur murdered or was it a suicide?  It bothered  Bogart and Hawks so much that Hawks sent a telegram to Chandler to find out.  But it turned out that Chandler didn’t know, either!  As I said, Chandler was mainly concerned with atmosphere, not facts about who did what.

The story, such as it is, of The Big Sleep begins with Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) being summoned to the mansion of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), a wealthy invalid with two wanton young daughters – the lewd and self-indulgent  Carmen (Martha Vickers) and the divorced Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall).. Sternwood is concerned that Carmen is being threatened for the nonpayment of her gambling debts. Marlowe agrees to look into the matter.  

But things turn out to be not so simple as that.  Marlowe soon learns that Carmen was being blackmailed by her phony creditor, whom Marlowe soon finds murdered.  And Marlowe learns from Vivian that her younger sister Carmen has been blackmailed before by other mysterious gangsters and miscreants, who may or may not be involved in this current murder.  Throughout all the various violent events that come along and the corpses that pile up, Marlowe tries to figure out what is going on.  But he is always one step behind.  However, along the way, Marlowe and Vivian (who also turns out to be a victim of blackmailing) gradually develop an attachment for each other.

I won’t go over the plot details here, but I can say that in the end, things get somewhat resolved, although we do learn that Marlowe, Vivian, and Carmen each killed someone who was threatening them individually [2].  

So what is it that accounts for The Big Sleep’s popularity?  I don’t think it is the intricate plot, because the plot is too random and loose-ended.  Moreover, we don’t get much of a feeling for what motivates most of the events that transpire.  And I don’t think it is the “Bogie and Bacall” Mystique, either.  That relationship is very much in the background and never really occupies center stage.  

No, I think what accounts for The Big Sleep’s popularity is that the film is so heavily loaded with all the accoutrements of film noir stylistics.  There is a nonstop barrage of all the incidental elements that the aficionados of film noir look for and recognize when they encounter an instance of the genre – 

• a dark, cynical, and obscure protagonist
• attractive women with unclear pasts and ambiguous intentions
• unexpected encounters with shady characters
• unanticipated violence
• cynical and innuendo-loaded wisecracks and dialogue
  

Thus film critic Roger Ebert loved the film precisely for these elements, as he remarked
[5]:

Working from Chandler's original words and adding spins of their own, the writers (William Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett) wrote one of the most quotable of screenplays: It's unusual to find yourself laughing in a movie not because something is funny but because it's so wickedly clever. (Marlowe on the "nymphy" kid sister: "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.") Unlike modern crime movies which are loaded with action, "The Big Sleep" is heavy with dialogue--the characters talk and talk, just like in the Chandler novels; it's as if there's a competition to see who has the most verbal style.

But I don’t see things that way.  An outstanding film cannot be just all clever talk; it has to have a compelling narrative, and The Big Sleep doesn’t have that.  The story of this film is too loose-ended and contorted.  So although the film has some entertaining moments (I did like the brief, separate interactions Marlowe had with Carmen (Martha Vickers) and Harry Jones (Elisha Cook, Jr.)), this is certainly not a great film noir.
★★★

 
Notes:

1. Leonard Maltin (ed.), “The Big Sleep (1946)”, Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, Plume, (2005), p. 47.  
2. Tim Dirth. “The Big Sleep (1946)”, “Filmsite”, (n.d.).   
   
3. Andrew Sarris, “Living the private-eye genre”, films in focus, The Village Voice” (8 November 1973).   
   
4. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “I'd Like More”, The Big Sleep (1946), Combustible Celluloid, (n.d.).   
   
5. Roger Ebert, “The Big Sleep”, Great Movies, RogerEbert.com, (22 June 1997).   
   
6. Brian Cady, Margarita Landazuri, and Frank Miller, “The Big Sleep”, Turner Classic Movies, (17 February 2005).     
   

Howard Hawks

Films of Howard Hawks:

• His Girl Friday - Howard Hawks (1940) 
• The Big Sleep -  Howard Hawks (1946)

“His Girl Friday” - Howard Hawks (1940)

Director Howard Hawks was notable for his popular successes over a long career and across almost all film genres. Though he was championed by both French New Wave critics and by Andrew Sarris, Hawks’s so-called “no-nonsense” style often seems merely conventional, and in fact many of his lesser films are distinctly run-of-the-mill. So his status as one of the preeminent film auteurs remains somewhat enigmatic. One of his most enduringly popular films, the comedy His Girl Friday (1940), is exemplary of some of these contradictions.

The story of His Girl Friday was based on the popular Broadway play, The Front Page (1928), by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which had been successfully filmed in 1931 by Lewis Milestone and was reprised in 1974 by Billy Wilder. The single set for that original play was the Press Room near Chicago’s Criminal Courts building and jail. The plot describes how a Chicago newspaper reporter, Hildy Johnson, enters the pressroom announcing to his colleagues his intended retirement from journalism but is immediately lured back into the exciting world of journalistic scooping by an improbable series of events involving murder, a jailbreak, and corrupt politics.

Hawks’s film version, which starred Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy, suffers from a number of immediately apparent deficiencies, and yet it clearly surpasses the Milestone and Wilder versions and ranks among the most popular movies ever. The reasons for that may be due to Hawks, or perhaps simply to some good fortune of alternate casting.

The principal deficiencies of His Girl Friday are straightforward to enumerate:

• The film is very stagy, focused as it is on basically two locations, the newsroom of the Chicago Morning Star newspaper and the Chicago courthouse pressroom.
• The camera setups are conventional and relatively flat, with mostly constant-distance shots.
• The plot features ridiculously improbable events that go beyond all limits of plausibility.
• The acting is so tongue-in-cheek and smirky that one feels that many of the players are not taking their roles seriously. It all appears to be something of put-on. Cary Grant is particularly guilty here, but he manages to pull it off, because, well, he’s Cary Grant.

And yet despite these drawbacks, the film succeeds. Why?

• One of the attractions can be associated with Hawks’s characteristic focus on male “gang” camaraderie and bonding that underpins the action. This always played to good effect in his war films and gangster films. Here, it is the group-loyalty of the Chicago press corps that Hawks accentuates. And after all, that is the key seduction that lures both Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) and her editor boss, Walter Burns (Cary Grant).
• A second positive feature of this film is the accentuated overlapping dialogue that intensifies the pace of the excited journalists chasing down the story. This broke with conventions in the sound era that tried to ensure that dialogue was distinct and clearly heard. In this case, some of the repartee involves people talking over each other, with one person starting up before another is finished. Hawks ensured that the dialogue was written so that even when the beginnings and endings of sentences might be lost in the noise, the dialogue could still be understood.
• A third, essentially crucial, feature of His Girl Friday, was Hawks’s decision to cast the role of Hildy Johnson as a woman, instead of the male casting for that role in the original play. This added an interesting gender-conflict feature to the journalism story, as well as contributing an underlying and parallel romantic element.
• But the most crucial feature of all to what makes the film a success is not due to Hawks; it is in spite of him. It is Rosalind Russell’s magnetic performance as Hildy Johnson that is the driving force behind the film’s success. Yet she was at least Hawsks’s ninth-choice for that role, after a number of leading actresses had all turned Hawks down for the part. But Russell proved to the key ingredient. Since Hawks allowed some ad-libbing on the set, Russell took advantage and filled out her role during the shooting. She later confessed that she even hired a writer to provide lines that could help her beef up her role.

Ultimately, this is Rosalind Russell’s film. She had the electricity, charm, and feminine magic to make the audience overlook all the cracks and corny inadequacies of the story and staging. And Hawks, at least, deserves the credit for finally giving her the space to do it.
★★★½