Restoring The Big Sleep

For the last thirty years or more, film archives and restorers have been hard at work correcting the vandalism of the film industry in the twentieth century. There has been Ronald Haver’s recreation of George Cukor’s A Star is Born (1954) using the surviving complete soundtrack plus some newly discovered footage and stills. Bob Gitt at the UCLA Film Archive found most of the sequences that had been removed at the insistence of exhibitors during the first screenings of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Some sequences have still not been found. The battered nitrate print I saw in the 1950s included a sequence not in the restoration. “We are still looking,” Gitt told me at the 1997 Sydney Film Festival.

Another restoration that dates back to the late 1970s was of Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948). The film is famous for having been shot in two weeks at Republic, a studio noted for its B westerns. In these circumstances one would have thought they would have let well alone. But for the American release Republic insisted on the revoicing of sequences where the Scottish accents Welles as Macbeth and his cast had adopted were thought to be too thick. The studio also cut the porter scene and in the process broke up an extraordinary extended take so that it was edited more conventionally. As well, they removed a final sequence where after Macbeth is killed and the rightful king is on the throne, one of the court goes to find the Weird Sisters and we hear “The charms wound up”. As we discovered in Australia when a 16mm print from New Zealand became available, these cuts were made only to the American prints, with Welles’s director’s cut being released in Europe and the British Commonwealth.

Warner Brothers’ interventions into The Big Sleep, however, were anything but corporate vandalism. Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler published in 1939, and scripted by William Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, the film was completed by director Howard Hawks early in 1945. The studio delayed its release until the backlog of Second World War movies had been distributed. Meanwhile the co-star, Lauren Bacall, miscast in Confidential Agent, had received appalling reviews. Worried that some of the scenes in The Big Sleep didn’t do the new star justice, Bacall’s agent, Charles K. Feldman, wrote to Jack Warner suggesting a reshoot. Warner agreed, some extra scenes were written and Hawks, the male lead, Humphrey Bogart, Bacall and some of the supporting cast went back into the studio. The film was released in 1946 and proved to be a great success. The first version more or less disappeared—until a nitrate print was discovered by Bob Gitt in the UCLA Film Archive, restored and screened for a brief season in 1997. In 2000 both versions were released on DVD. Although the transfers are immaculate, I recall Warners prints of the 1940s as darker and with greater contrast than they appear here, especially when the cinematographer was Sid Hickox. Nevertheless, having these two versions available illuminates one of the acknowledged masterpieces of American cinema.

From the outset viewers found the film bewildering. Certainly it was in the popular hard-boiled detective style that had begun in the pulp magazines and was by the 1940s regularly appearing in hard cover on the best-seller lists and of course being adapted to film (The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past). The basic plot, while not a cliché, was at least familiar to readers and filmgoers. Private eye Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is summoned to the lavish mansion of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to investigate the attempted blackmail of his nymphomaniac daughter, Carmen (Martha Vickers). He encounters the General’s older daughter Vivian (Bacall) “drinking her lunch out of a bottle”, follows various leads to a bookshop and a house in Laverne Terrace, where Marlowe finds Carmen in a sleazy living room, drugged on a chair in front of a concealed camera with the body of the blackmailer at her feet.

At this point the film simply doesn’t make sense. Why is Carmen worried about a picture of herself when she is fully clothed? Why is the client we see in the bookstore so nervous? What are the books that are being cleared out of the back of the store? Much of this is solved when you read Chandler’s original. The bookshop is a pornographic lending library, “a smut racket”. Carmen is naked when Marlowe finds her; and she wants to get back a nude picture of herself. The film-makers did their best—the shooting script has Carmen in a dressing gown that seems as though it had been hastily put over her—but the censorship of the time would not permit even that. Director and performers tried to suggest more but it was beyond even the formidable talents of Hawks, Bogart and Vickers. Of course a number of filmgoers at the time would have read the book and realised what Hawks, his writers and actors were implying, as I did when I first saw the The Big Sleep on television. And indeed, 1940s censorship aside, the first half of the film is excellent Raymond Chandler. Most of the characters and incidents come direct from the novel and work splendidly.

Chandler described The Big Sleep as a “detective yarn that is more interested in people than in plot”. In fact for the book he used the plots of two of his short stories, “Killer in the Rain” and “The Curtain”, then added an incident from an early Marlowe, “Finger Man”. Chandler deepened the characterisation and toned down the violence of the originals, all of which was faithfully recreated in the film adaptation. Hawks conveys “the smell of fear” the author considered so important:

[The] characters [live] in a world gone wrong, a world in which long before the atom bomb civilisation had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law [is] something we manipulate for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night.

This comes from the introduction to The Simple Art of Murder, the first collection of Chandler’s short stories, published in 1950, but these observations apply equally to the novels he based on the stories that first appeared in the pulp magazines. (These stories were collected and published by Penguin as Killer in the Rain in 1964.)

Hawks gets this atmosphere just about right. The low-key lighting and the eye-level camera with an occasional tight pan to emphasise a dramatic point create a visual equivalent of Chandler’s prose. His dialogue, unlike that of his great contemporary James M. Cain, could be transposed into the script with only minimal editing. As the late Roger Ebert observed, viewers find themselves smiling at the sheer cleverness of the dialogue as well as the wit.

The real problem for the film-makers was some of the plotting of the original and the novel’s resolution. Bogart and Hawks got into an argument about who killed the chauffeur. They couldn’t decide, so they telegraphed Raymond Chandler, who told them he didn’t know either. This is hardly surprising as Chandler had left it open in both the book and the short story. The killer is revealed in a scene in the District Attorney’s office that was included in the first cut but omitted from the revised version. Having this sequence now readily available enriches our understanding of the film-makers’ achievement. It enables three of the fine character actors who enriched American cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, Regis Toomey, Thomas E. Jackson and James Flavin, to deliver some well written dialogue that clarifies the plots and sub-plots. We also see Marlowe explaining his motivations to fellow professionals.

The great scene that was created to replace the DA sequence was designed to enhance Lauren Bacall’s portrayal of Vivian. At this early stage of her career—she was only twenty—Bacall’s persona had been crafted by Howard Hawks so that her character seemed to be a knowing sophisticated woman more insolent than the nearly always insolent Bogart. This had worked brilliantly in their first film, To Have and Have Not. And as everyone knows, Bacall and Bogart fell in love, and this can be seen in their performances. This rapport is also there in The Big Sleep, even though, as we know from the biographies, they were going through a difficult time during the first shoot. The new scene was crafted by Philip Epstein, who with his brother Julius wrote some of the best lines in Casablanca, and includes the justly famous jockey dialogue where love-making is compared to horse-racing. It is beautifully played by the stars, who by then had just come back from their honeymoon, and its frank sensuality is far better than the rather awkward sexuality of the novel. “She has a beautiful little body, hasn’t she … you should see mine,” Vivian tells Marlowe in the book.

Vivian is another of the enigmatic women in the hard-boiled genre. In both novel and film there is a missing ex-bootlegger, Sean Regan. Involved somehow is the gangster Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) who owns the pornographic bookstore and runs a crooked gambling casino. “What has Eddie Mars got on you?” Marlowe asks Vivian repeatedly. Is she using her sexuality to “sugar” him off the case? Can Marlowe trust her? Since it is Bacall and Bogart, and not Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or Bogart and Lizbeth Scott in Dead Reckoning, of course he can. But watching her prove it makes for some very satisfying drama that is far more effective in the revised version.

The resolution seems to have been quite a problem for the director and his writers. In the novel Carmen has killed Sean Regan because he rejected her, and tries to do the same to Marlowe. Eddie Mars has covered up the murder and is blackmailing Vivian. Out of respect for General Sternwood, Marlowe doesn’t tell the police and urges Vivian to find Carmen proper treatment. A film where a murderess escaped unpunished would never have passed the 1940s production code. So Hawks and Chandler plotted an alternative ending. Marlowe and Carmen are caught in the blackmailer’s house by Eddie Mars and his life-takers. Marlowe knows that whoever goes out the door will be killed. He tosses a coin to let God decide whether he’ll allow her to go out the door—heads she goes, tails she doesn’t. The coin comes up heads. Marlowe lets Carmen go then has second thoughts. Thinking he is trying to hold her there for the police, Carmen starts to open the door, pulls a gun and is about to shoot Marlowe when she is cut to pieces by machine-gun fire.

In the shooting script Carmen still goes out the door but is shot by Eddie Mars, who is then killed by Marlowe. This too was rejected. The film’s ending has it both ways. Carmen is replaced by Vivian. Marlowe traps Eddie Mars in the blackmailer’s house and forces him to go out the door to be shot down by his own men, then tells the police Mars killed Sean Regan. The final shot is of Vivian and Marlowe’s cigarettes side by side in an ashtray.

The first version of The Big Sleep should, I believe, never be regarded as some kind of “director’s cut”. The changes were made by Hawks himself and the scenes he re-shot are definite improvements. In my opinion the only scene that should have been retained is Marlowe’s encounter with the DA. If you are screening the DVD I suggest running the 1946 cut but at the appropriate moment pausing to view that sequence. It is rewriting film history, but it does make for enjoyable viewing.