The Big Sleep — Directed by Howard Hawks. Private Eye Drama. A very rich family hires a private eye to keep them out of trouble and it lands him in plenty of trouble. 114 minutes Black and White 1944/46.
* * * *
I found this irritating this time round. When it first came out, I found it glossy and opaque. It still is those things, but this time I got tired of the revamp of the B&B sizzle from To Have And Have Not. The story is a rabbit chase of red herrings – bunnies and fish, yes – and you don’t know which ones you’re supposed to pay attention to. Is it the herrings of the plot, which is a series of rooms opening into one another that you traipse though wondering why you are there? Or is it the series of bunnies in side-rooms, in which Bacall slinks to and from Bogart in a negligee of lies? Of course, in films like this, everyone is lying, including the rooms. I found the B & B relationship a put up job: they never have a conversation; what they have is repartee. So, strictly speaking, there are no real people here. Moreover the film is deficient in its supporting players, none of whom have the interest of those from To Have And Have Not (to which this was a follow-up), with the single except of Elisha Cook Junior, who never fails, but appears in but one scene, and Dorothy Malone, gorgeous at age 19 making her film debut. Her one scene is a case in point of what happens throughout this picture. In the morning, Hawks would rewrite a scene to be shot, set it in the afternoon, and begin shooting at 4 PM. What he was doing was setting the story aside and developing “interesting scenes,” such as the bookshop one with Malone, which is amusing, and for which there is no real excuse. Made in 1944/45, the film was not released until 1946, and then reshot in order to enhance Bacall’s role in the proceedings, so we are given a bunch of scenes with her that place her in close allure with Bogart, while the story itself dawdles among the extras. This makes the whole thing even more hard to follow. Not that you’re supposed to follow it; all you’re supposed to do is follow not-following it, which makes you feel like some dumb kid dragged along by the collar. Bogart brings the same character to us that he brought us in The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and To Have And Have Not. Practice has made him perfect with this personage. He is not a very good actor, in some ways, and you can see it in the ear- rubbing Hawks assigned him to. It never works. It’s never motivated. It’s just an add-on. But at what he does, nobody does better, a calm, sensitive, smart, rueful, dogged, smart-mouth, with core-deep masculinity and a wrecked liver. His humor, especially, engages suddenly and rather lovingly, at the spectacle of human folly. In many ways he is an entirely responsive actor, good at badminton, aka stichomythia, and gifted with a monotone that cuts through steel. Louise Brooks accused him of having sacrificed his talent by becoming enamored of the movement of his own lips. Interesting, huh? I can’t say, but no one could have executed this material so well, so stringently, and with such unassailable dignity as Humphrey Bogart.