The Big Sleep

 

I was sitting at a light, and the guy in front of me had a “Dude Abides” bumper sticker, and having just watched The Big Lebowski not long before, I couldn’t help thinking that the Dude doesn’t, really.  All due respect to Jeff Bridges – who’s terrific in pretty much everything he does, Hell and High Water only the most recent example – Lebowski dates really badly.  On the other hand, Miller’s Crossing seems timeless.  This is to take two examples from the Coen oeuvre.  Robert Towne.  Tequila Sunrise, from 1988, is stuck there; Chinatown, released in ‘74, has no such issue.  Why is Altman’s The Long Goodbye, Chandler updated to the contemporary L.A. of 1973, left behind, but the Chandler of The Big Sleep (1945) as present and real as a dime?

You could say that Miller’s Crossing and Chinatown are intentional period pieces, yes, and that Tequila Sunrise and 1973’s Long Goodbye are trying intentionally to be timely, but we should remember that The Big Sleep, in 1945, was in fact contemporary.  Take a look at the Woody Van Dyke much-celebrated adaption of Hammett’s The Thin Man, in 1934, Powell and Myrna Loy.  The leads are terrific, the dialogue snappy, the runtime comes in at an hour and a half, but you’re still completely aware that you’re watching a picture from 1934.  Not nearly as true of John Huston’s adaption, in 1941, of Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, which still reads as immediate.  But so does Casablanca, in my opinion.  Maybe the difference is Bogart.

Bogart went from second leads to movie star with High Sierra, in 1940 (even if he’s actually billed second, after Ida Lupino).  He did Falcon in ‘41, and Casablanca in ‘42. He worked with Hawks for the first time – and famously, met Bacall – in To Have and Have Not, in 1944.  Bogart and Bacall fell in love while they were making the picture, you can see it happening.  The Big Sleep was the second movie they made together; it wrapped in early ‘45, but released a year later.  Thereby lies a tale.

The first cut of the picture has more Martha Vickers (the little sister), and less Bacall.  Hawks went back and shot extra scenes, and recut the movie.  Vickers got less screen time, Bacall got more, by about twenty minutes.  It made Bacall’s career, and Martha Vickers never got another part as good, to make it up to her.  The plot actually makes less sense, in the re-edited version; Carmen, the baby sister, turns out in the book to have murdered Sean Regan (spoiler alert), but they had to change the ending for the movie, so the whole thing doesn’t hang together.  None of this matters.  The picture is dreamlike: Hawks later remarked that the audience reaction made him realize that if you kept things moving fast enough, nobody cared whether any of it made sense.  This isn’t quite true.  The plot almost comes together.  You paper over the holes because of your giddy pleasure in its exhilarating surface tension.

My point about The Big Sleep being contemporary to its own era is that an audience back then would recognize both specific detail and things left unspoken.  They’d notice, for example, the gas ration stickers on Marlowe’s windshield – the war was only just over.  They’d realize that when Dorothy Malone pulls the shades and pours Marlowe a drink, there’s more on offer than just what’s in the glass.  They’d know what the cop, Bernie Ohls, was on about when he says about Sean Regan, “Oh, you mean the ex-legger Gen. Sternwood hired to do his drinking for him?”  (They weren’t that far removed from Prohibition, and Repeal.)  They could figure out what kind of books Geiger was selling, in brown paper wrappers, and why Carmen was vulnerable to blackmail, and what the relationship was between Geiger and Carol Lundgren, the kid who cleans up after the murder, and dresses the dead man in his Chinese pyjamas, and lays him out on the bed.  None of it had to be spelled out.

There’s also the still-shocking violence.  The death of Elisha Cook.  The moment in the garage, Canino flipping the roll of coins in his hand, Marlowe taken by surprise, his arms pinned to his sides with the spare tire, and Canino with the sucker punch, straight to the jaw – Canino opens his balled fist, and the loose coins spill out.  And the killing of Canino himself, as cold-blooded as anybody could get away with, at the time. 

The test, I think, is whether we recognize their attitudes as like ours, their choices, their motives, their reactions, not so much the fashions in clothes, as their manner.  Do they feel genuine to us?  I think Marlowe does.  I’m not a big fan of Chandler’s down-these-mean-streets prescription, but if anybody can live up to it, Bogart certainly can.  And he does it without being performative, or self-conscious – it’s natural and lived-in, someone he’s familiar with.

Bacall, too, is a very assured presence.  You get the feeling that the characters, as thin as the script is, have a sense of their own back story, and don’t need to fill it in for us.  Hawks, knowing he’s onto a good thing, gives her the last word.  Bogart is finishing up the story, what’s happened and what has to happen next, and Bacall tells him he’s forgotten one thing: her.  What’s wrong with you? he asks her.  “Nothing you can’t fix,” she says.

Speculative Cinemas

“We were just leaving the movies - Casablanca, with Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan…”  I had the idea one time to use this as the opening of a story, to signal it was alternate history.  This casting was supposedly floated, at some point, but it was a public relations stunt; Hal Wallis, the producer, later said he never wanted anybody but Bogart. 

Quentin Tarantino published a book, year before last, called Cinema Speculation, and my first thought was that he’d speculate.  For example, Howard Hawks once claimed that he was set to direct Casablanca, and Michael Curtiz was assigned to Sergeant York, but Curtiz wanted to get out of doing a picture about “hillbillies” and he, Hawks, was uncomfortable making a “musical,” (I’m not sure what he means by that, La Marseillaise, As Time Goes By?) and they switched movies.  I don’t know whether to credit this.  Hawks is clearly the right guy for Gary Cooper, and Curtiz is just as clearly the right director for Casablanca.  In fact, Warners kept two crews working simultaneously, so Curtiz could prep his next picture while he shot the current one: he was that efficient – or ruthless, some would say.  All the same, Tarantino is nothing if not a fanboy, you knew that, and you can imagine how entertaining he might be with What Ifs. 

Sam Peckinpah was fired from The Cincinatti Kid about a week in.  Ostensibly, because he was making a dirty movie; he did a scene with Rip Torn and a naked girl in a fur coat.  (“Oh,” Peckinpah says, “and I was shooting in black-and-white.”)  Not to mention, Sharon Tate got the boot in favor of Tuesday Weld, and Spencer Tracy was signed to play Lancey Howard, but Edward G. Robinson came off the bench when Tracy had health issues.  Norman Jewison gets the director credit, and Cincinnati Kid is a halfway decent picture – Robinson is terrific, too, he steals the movie – but you can’t help wondering.  In the aftermath of the Major Dundee disaster, The Cincinnati Kid could have put Peckinpah back on the map, Steve McQueen a brand name already, even if shooting a major release in widescreen color is the better box-office call.  McQueen and Peckinpah of course did Junior Bonner and The Getaway later on. 

Here’s a story Quint does tell.  McQueen passed on Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, after Paul Newman had been signed.  They offered Sundance to Warren Beatty, but Beatty wanted to play Butch, and he wanted Elvis as Sundance. 

A lot of people probably know that Dirty Harry started out as a Frank Sinatra vehicle - the original pitch for Columbo had Bing Crosby to star, too – but after they settled on Clint Eastwood, he brought Don Siegel over from Universal, to direct.  Siegel, at one point, wanted to cast Audie Murphy as Scorpio, the serial killer, because Audie Murphy had a baby face and didn’t look the part (although he’s credited with killing 241 enemy combatants in WWII).  Siegel had made two pictures with Audie, one, The Gun Runners, a remake of To Have and Have Not.  Also, if you think Audie can’t act, you should check out The Unforgiven, his second picture with John Huston.

*As a footnote, Andy Robinson, who did play Scorpio, has a good hundred credits under his belt, but it took him twenty years to shake his association with the part (he’s really  that good in Dirty Harry), and even then, it was because he wore heavy prosthetics in Deep Space Nine.

Nobody but Gable was ever going to play Rhett Butler, but there are dozens of surviving screen tests for Scarlett.  Everybody wanted the part.  1400 interviews, 400 callbacks.  Katherine Hepburn.  Paulette Goddard had a good shot, but she was shacked up with Chaplin, and not married to him, which gave Selznick the jitters.  Tallulah Bankhead.  Susan Hayward, Frances Dee, Jean Arthur, Lucille Ball, Miriam Hopkins, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Joan Bennett.  Bette Davis was an early favorite, but Warners wouldn’t lend her out.  She was chafing against studio discipline, and Jack Warner wanted to teach her a lesson.  She did Jezebel at Warners, which is basically the same story as GWTW, and the better picture, for my money.  The question is whether you can see her as Scarlett.  Or if you can see anybody else as Scarlett, once Vivien Leigh is in the room.  She takes up all the air.  You may or may not actually like the movie, but she surely makes it hers.

Cutting back to Quentin, he does get up to some mischief, not so much in Cinema Speculation, but in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you have Leo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton playing the Steve McQueen part in The Great Escape, and Damian Lewis, as McQueen, bemoaning the fact that he’s not getting into Sharon Tate’s pants. 

The question isn’t whether it’s real, but whether it’s convincing.  I personally can’t conjure up Brando or Albert Finney in Lawrence of Arabia, but they were both offered the part.  Lee Marvin walked away from The Wild Bunch to do Paint Your Wagon.  You just never know.  Somewhere out there are these ghost pictures, that never got made, or got made with the wrong talent, or somehow went off the rails. 

We’ll never get to see those movies, running in the private drive-in of our mind’s eye.  But maybe we’ve been spared.