Howard Hawks (1946)

I confess …

I liked:  Humphrey Bogart’s shadow movement, fingering his right ear lobe; Max Steiner’s full-blooded music, much more effective here – where it’s a counterpoint to the stylised, coolly deflating line readings – than in melodramas where Steiner’s scores shout what’s already coming across loud and clear from the actors; Dorothy Malone’s charm as the smart bookshop assistant (she takes off her glasses and lets down her hair); Elisha Cook Jr, who has an engaging, jittery intensity as one of the various mean streetwalkers (Marlowe likes him too); the early scene, in a greenhouse, in which the bitterly invalid General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) hires Philip Marlowe.  It was good to be reminded just how perfect Bogart is in this kind of role – he incarnates Marlowe completely (not least because he looks so unhealthy), definitively.  (I’ve never taken to him trying different characters – in The African Queen, Sabrina and so on).  As for Lauren Bacall, she doesn’t always seem to connect with the words she speaks but it doesn’t matter:  her come-hither-get-lost look, the way she moves and wears clothes, are what make her a star – her unanswerable presence makes characterisation nearly irrelevant.

The plotting in The Big Sleep – the screenplay is credited to William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman – is legendarily complicated:  it’s alleged they had to go back to Raymond Chandler for an explanation of one bit of the story and he wasn’t sure.  But as I struggle with understanding much simpler plots I didn’t find that distinctive.  I know the lines are witty (and the wit is sustained) but, except for the double entendres in the exchange between Bogart and Bacall about horse racing/sex, they didn’t make me smile – I just kept registering they were witty.  The trouble is that I can’t get interested in the characters or in what happens:  everything else seems subservient to the hardboiled dialogue and the look of the thing – the film seemed be sealed off, happening a long way away.  I think I got mildly excited near the end because it was near the end.

19 January 2011