For all its reputation as a classic, and despite the greatness of Howard Hawks as a filmmaker, The Big Sleep has never quite belonged in the front rank of his work–at least not to the same degree as Scarface, Twentieth Century, Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, Red River, The Big Sky, Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Rio Bravo, to cite my own list of favorites. Unlike To Have and Have Not (1944)–Hawks’s previous collaboration with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, writers Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, cinematographer Sid Hickox, and composer Max Steiner–it qualifies as neither a personal manifesto on social and sexual behavior nor an abstract meditation on jivey style and braggadocio set within a confined space, though it periodically reminds one that exercises of this kind are what Hawks did best. Most of the time, the film’s energy and aplomb are devoted to getting through its labyrinthine gumshoe plot without stumbling–a notable feat in itself, but more a triumph of accommodation than of unbridled self-expression.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Ever since Hawks was discovered as an auteur by a couple of eccentric critics in the 50s–Manny Farber in the United States and Jacques Rivette in France–critical approaches to his work have been hamstrung by his own notion of himself as nothing more than a gentleman jock and journeyman hipster. His main idea of self-expression was figuring out who to hire, how to mold and coddle his employees, and how to have a certain amount of fun with them while holding his own with studio management. Resembling a bandleader-pianist like Basie or Ellington, he understood how to show his personnel to best advantage. Sometimes this was a matter of setting one player off against another, and sometimes it was simply knowing when to lay out, when to solo, and when to feed chords to another player. As Todd McCarthy confirms in his new 756-page biography Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, Hawks didn’t even bother to direct the musical numbers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But that no more diminishes his stature (or the movie’s) than the recent revelation that Billy Strayhorn actually wrote a lot of Ellington’s best tunes reduces the composer’s greatness (or that of “Take the ‘A’ Train”). Ellington’s best music and Hawks’s best movies are both supremely about the joy of people living and working together, and our knowledge of the trade-offs–even in some cases rip-offs–involved in these subtle transactions only enhances our sense of the artist’s style and taste. As Farber once put it, Hawks’s “whole moviemaking system seems a secret preoccupation with linking, a connections business involving people, plots, and eight-inch hat brims,” and it stands to reason that plenty of these connections took place offscreen as well as on.
Complicating and occasionally enhancing these revisions was the fluctuating relationship between Bacall and Bogart, who’d fallen in love while shooting To Have and Have Not. During the initial shoot on The Big Sleep, Bogart was still married to someone else and fitfully trying to make that marriage work, and Hawks, who may have had designs of his own on Bacall, was mainly interested in keeping his two stars apart when they weren’t working together. By the time the three of them regrouped to shoot the new scenes for the second version, Bogart and Bacall had become inseparable, and as a consequence Hawks’s relationship with both had cooled.
In The Big Sleep, one has to weigh Bogart’s sexual gallantry and attractiveness to Lauren Bacall’s character and the various flirty ingenues he encounters on his rounds–most notably Dorothy Malone’s bookseller and Joy Barlowe’s taxi driver–against the contempt he and the movie express toward Vivian’s sister Carmen (Martha Vickers) and a schemer named Agnes (Sonia Darrin), both dismissed as irredeemable, inhuman rodents packed with sex appeal. The cozy clubhouse atmosphere Hawks conjures up with such allure and panache is always predicated on such nonnegotiable exclusions.
The Big Sleep Rating **** Masterpiece Directed by Howard Hawks Written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone, Pat Clark, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Sonia Darrin, and Elisha Cook Jr.
