(At Least) Two Big Sleeps

A guiding and protective hand was loosened when Howard Hawks sold to Warner Bros. his contractual interest in Lauren Bacall. Despite the debut sensation of To Have and Have Not, she would now be as vulnerable and exposed as any untried newcomer, save for expectations running higher and critical barb-spinners poised in anticipation of her follow-up vehicle. Confidential Agent (co-starring Bacall with Charles Boyer) might have sunk the whole enterprise had the public been so unforgiving as reviewers. The sultry stare has been almost as widely publicized as the glance of the Medusa represented jocular panning Bacall and Confidential Agent received. This was the sort of dog that begged to be kicked. Mutual distrust and antipathy would characterize the Warners/Bacall relationship from this point forward. It was thought she’d wisely (if not cunningly) drafted a champion in Bogart who would wade into studio battle on her behalf and spare Bacall the starlet’s eventual fate (was Dolores Moran her cautionary example?). What remained for Bogart and Howard Hawks was to effect a rescue from the debacle of Confidential Agent and consolidate Bacall’s stardom with The Big Sleep, a project that would hopefully demonstrate she was no mere flash in the pan. The latter as final verdict would itself be narrowly avoided, for The Big Sleep was a deck of cards shuffled and reshuffled over a near two year period between initial shooting and eventual release. How and why it happened is understood better thanks to a surviving early cut that allows us to track The Big Sleep as the work in (slow) progress it was. Would we think less of classic era favorites given more rough drafts and false starts to examine and evaluate? Maybe it was wiser studio policy that mandated junking outtakes even if it meant the loss of Tarzan Escapes, forty minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons, and so many other now lost treasures. Proud companies didn’t like unfinished merchandise getting to their public. The Pacific’s bottom might be our richest film archive but for all that cruel salt water. The Big Sleep in dress rehearsal survives by virtue of prints shipped to military bases for off-duty entertainment. Soldiers felt like something special getting movies in advance of folks back home, and studios earned much good will putting fighting forces at the front of movie lines. Resulting letters home recommending previewed features created buzz among family members and enhanced boxoffice when the shows played stateside, so rewards for studio generosity were ultimately measured by enhanced profits. 1944’s Hollywood Canteen endorses Warners’ policy of sneaking new films to servicemen when Robert Hutton brags to Bette Davis of having seen her Mr. Skeffington ahead of civilian patrons. The Big Sleep went out in like fashion after principal photography was completed in Spring 1945. It would be years before anyone noticed substantial differences between 16mm military prints and the version WB eventually released in August of 1946, as most of the former were gathered up and disposed of shortly after they’d played off in camps. One that survived came into noted collector David Bradley’s possession, but was seen by few. Robert Gitt and UCLA restoration crews got the 1945 Big Sleep back into circulation for archival showings and a DVD combo with 1946’s standard version. Differences are both subtle and substantial, depending on what you’re looking for.

Agent Charles K. Feldman isn’t someone historians talk about, so influence he wielded will probably never be acknowledged or appreciated, but memos coming out of The Big Sleep suggest he’s due credit for a lot of broke things getting fixed and others being propped. In addition to well known reshooting he encouraged in January of 1946, Feldman seems to have arranged for even earlier retakes and additional scenes. He was Lauren Bacall’s representative, and didn’t want to see her ruined with ill-judged costuming and unflattering hairstyles. At some point, the initial scene with Bogart and Bacall went back before cameras, as the still shown here reveals a completely different outfit and coiffure from what ended up in either extant versions. There were issues as well over a veil Bacall wore during another scene (also here). As women never seem to opt for these anymore, I wondered how long ago they went out of style. Unflattering and off-putting at best, you’d have to wonder whose brainstorm it was to hang one on a nineteen-year-old actress, and whether Howard Hawks’ own middle-age betrayed him in using it. Bette Davis donned similar apparel in Now, Voyager and even kisses Paul Henried through the latticework, a scene always good for uneasy laughs out of modern viewers. Feldman wanted the veil dropped from The Big Sleep, but for at least the 1945 edition, Warners ignored him. Everyone agreed by the beginning of 1946 that The Big Sleep needed further work, and most of that would revolve around strengthening Bacall’s part. Feldman went so far as to warn that if this were not done, Warners’ investment in the actress might be a lost one. As with To Have and Have Not, there was another player nipping at Bacall’s heels, and like before, priorities had to be sorted out. Martha Vickers would be the sacrificial lamb, though in this case, Howard Hawks would not be so compliant when time came to gut her part. "The Big Sleep" has had an unfortunate history, said co-screenwriter William Faukner at the time. The girl who played the nymphy sister was so good she shattered Miss Bacall completely. So they cut the picture in such a way all her best scenes were left out except one. The result made nonsense and Howard Hawks threatened to sue to restrain Warners from releasing the picture. After long argument, I hear it; he went back in and did a lot of reshooting. Hawks had cast Martha Vickers after seeing her on a magazine cover, much as he had Bacall, only Vickers had done films prior to The Big Sleep, albeit small parts in unimportant ones. With Bacall now off his personal contract payroll, Hawks was perhaps less willing to steamroll other players for her benefit, thus his loud objections to Warners’ plan for denuding Vickers’ role.

The Carmen Sternwood character was originally tagged for a spectacular third act finish according to Faukner; a hair-raising scene, as he called it. Instead of Eddie Mars exiting into a hail of henchman bullets (the climax we know), initial scripting had Vickers’ Carmen backing out the door with a pistol trained on Marlowe, only to be mowed down with machine guns when she’s spotted from outside. Whether such violence went before cameras is a question. Code restrictions would surely have prevented its inclusion in the final Big Sleep. Martha Vickers is good enough throughout to make us wonder how she might have fared if the part had been left intact. What became of her might have evoked memories of Dolores Moran among those who cared to notice. Few would. Martha Vickers was born in May 1925. She’d have been nineteen when The Big Sleep was shot between October 10, 1944 and January 12, 1945. Howard Hawks was supposed to have had a long-term affair with her, though anecdotes Regis Toomey told late in that actor’s life suggest she was woefully naïve about certain aspects of her "nymphy" character in The Big Sleep (according to Toomey, she confirmed virtue she'd maintained when kidded by cast and director). I wonder if Hawks didn’t get (or take) a lot of credit for conquests among actresses he never made. Persistently self-serving in every other career account, why not this? Indeed if Vickers accommodated him, no favors appear to have been reciprocated, and isn’t that, after all, why starlets bed down with powerful producer/directors to begin with? All she ever hit after The Big Sleep was a thick brick wall. Warners paired her with Jack Carson, Dane Clark, Zachary Scott; every pinch hitter and low scorer they had. Love and Learn was sufficiently lame as to be deplored even by its cut-and-paste director Frederick DeCordova. Vickers maintained public profile by marrying Mickey Rooney, which, like her Warners contract, wouldn’t last. She turned up in a second season Perry Mason I watched last week, somewhere down the cast list and bumped off short of the halfway sponsor break. Howard Hawks told Peter Bogdonovich of Vickers coming to him in tears over her skidded-out career after The Big Sleep, only to be chastised by the director for playing ingenues again after she’d been so good as a nymphomaniac. She died in 1971 at age forty-six.

That veil was finally off by 1946, but what of Bogie’s pajamas? No one mentioned it at the time. After all, men still wore them, including detectives (William Powell’s silken pair in The Thin Man) and private eyes. Sam Spade was pajama-clad upon receiving word of Miles Archer’s death. Modifications would come in the sixties. Sans top James Bond played host to a tarantula bedmate in Dr.No and would henceforth dispense with bottoms as well, this being a new era wherein heroes seldom if ever slept alone. The Code dictated single occupancy for Philip Marlowe come sacktime, but have passing years and changing fashion taken away some of Bogart’s cool for sleepwear he chose? Wartime necessitated The Big Sleep be shot indoors, thus a look and sound of alternate reality beyond even that we expect from old Hollywood. Street scenes are done on Warner stages. Car doors slam and echoes reverberate against studio walls. When Bogart runs his auto off a roadside, we’re startled to find ourselves, if briefly, out among open spaces. On the topic of automobiles, were their interiors ever more celebrated than in The Big Sleep? This one really embodies the romance of forties driving. In fact, vehicles here compel most when sitting still. Bogart is staked out comfortably in his and goes through a pack of Chesterfields waiting for something to happen inside a sound stage house, and this after rifling another parked car on the premises. Interior lights cast flattering noirish glows, ID tags hang from steering wheels (neat --- I should get one!), and ready gun compartments snap open at the touch. Spacious front seating might allow for picnics if one were so inclined, and every compliance is there for love scenes played out minus the impediment of pesky safety belts we’re required (by law in many states) to wear. Bogart stalks hoodlum prey from behind leviathan-sized sedans providing cover as adequate as tanks he’d utilized in Sahara. If Americans were indeed gripped by the postwar driving obsession I’ve read about, surely we may credit The Big Sleep for starting them in that direction. There would (unfortunately) be no more Bogart/Hawks collaborations after this. Hurt feelings over personal choices Bacall made saw to that. The now married couple would not be comfortable working with this director again, and estrangement between them added up to entertainment loss for us all. Would Dark Passage and Key Largo have been better with Hawks in charge? Probably so. They’d at least have had more humor, and judging by how both turned out, could have used it. I’ve read that Hawks never visited Bogart when the actor was sick, explaining that since he hadn't been invited before, there was no call to show up now that the end was near.