Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  The other reason for the slack pace was the continual rewriting of the screenplay. Through the first half of the shooting, Hawks was continually pushing Faulkner to further condense the vast amount of material in the script. Hawks also did his own share of rewriting, notably in two scenes. The first was the expository scene between Bogart and Bacall in Marlowe’s office which—in contrast to his earlier attempts to stay under budget and on schedule—Hawks rewrote on the set all morning, rehearsed for more than two hours after lunch, then shot, finally rolling the cameras for the first time at 4:30 P.M. The second was a scene in Eddie Mars’s office, which Hawks similarly rewrote nearly all day while the cast and crew waited, finally making the first take at 4:40 P.M.

  As The Big Sleep moved into its much more complicated—and, as far as the script was concerned, much less well worked out—second half, Faulkner began to ease himself off the picture and out of Hollywood. He was desperately anxious to return home to Mississippi—it was a toss-up as to who was drinking more during this time, Faulkner or Bogart. He told Meta Carpenter, “I have to get back to my own writing.… I’ll never get it done in this town. Sometimes I think if I do one more treatment or screenplay, I’ll lose whatever power I have as a writer.” Certain that Hawks could carry on without him, Faulkner requested a six-month unpaid leave from the studio, beginning December 13, but as a favor to his friend he wrote twelve pages of revisions on the train, after he had gone off salary.

  Hawks again called on Jules Furthman; up until then, his only contribution to the film was having supplied the orchids for the opening scene in General Sternwood’s greenhouse. Unlike To Have and Have Not, in which Furthman’s influence was more decisive than that of either Faulkner or Hemingway, The Big Sleep employed the writer’s talents mostly on a straight craftsmanship level, sharpening dialogue and condensing and reshaping scenes for the final portion of the script. Furthman also had to find a new ending. From the outset, Faulkner and Brackett, aware of the enormous potential for censorship problems, had bent over backward in an effort to anticipate them. As a result, there were surprisingly few objections from the Breen Office once the initial script was submitted to it in early October. The office’s concerns mainly surrounded Carmen’s character: she was to indulge in no thumb-sucking or “any other activities … which might give a questionable flavor to her character,” and it must be clear that she is not “being blackmailed by means of some nude or lewd photographs.” The censor’s overriding worry, however, was the ending, for it was completely inadmissable that “Marlowe deliberately sends Carmen out to her death.” Hawks didn’t like the Faulkner-Brackett wrap-up either, nor did it serve the desired purpose of bringing Marlowe and Vivian together at the end.

  During the two weeks before Christmas, using the revisions Faulkner wrote on the train and those Furthman was now producing, Hawks made drastic cuts and changes in the screenplay. Despite a lavish bedroom set built for a scene in which Marlowe was to pay a second visit to General Sternwood, Hawks replaced the sequence with a simple phone call, eliminating fifteen pages of script and four or five days of shooting. Over a lunch meeting with Jack Warner’s deputy, Steve Trilling, the director ennumerated the cuts he wanted to make that would save a week’s work, just as he was shooting up to four or five pages of script per day, unusually high for him. A couple of days were devoted to script conferences and discussion of revisions, but they resulted in net time gained due to the number of pages dropped from the schedule. Bogart’s “illness” immediately after Christmas gave Hawks and Furthman precious additional time to work on the script. Specifically, Furthman rewrote the scene in Marlowe’s office in which Vivian offers him five hundred dollars to close the case, the scene in which the D.A. tells Marlowe to lay off, the car sequence between Marlowe and Vivian in which she says that she killed Regan, and the entire ending, copies of which Hawks was able to give to the actors only on January 5, the day they started shooting it.

  In later years, Hawks claimed, “The end of the story was done by the censors.” They said, ‘Howard, you can’t get away with this.’ And I said, ‘O.K., you write a scene for me.’ And they did, and it was a lot more violent, it was everything I wanted. I made it and was very happy about it. I said, ‘I’ll hire you fellows as writers.’” Hawks grossly exaggerated the artistic abilities of the censors, as well as the sort of work they would actually undertake. There is no written record of the Breen Office suggesting any ending at all, so it was undoubtedly conveyed in a personal meeting between Hawks and the office’s representatives that they would accept an ending in which Marlowe forces Eddie Mars out the door of the house into machine-gun fire from his own men, which would suggest that it was he, and not Carmen, who killed Regan and would also make Marlowe the agent for Mars’s proper fate. From Hawks’s point of view, this solution did wrap everything up neatly, and allowed him and Furthman the considerable latitude of including Vivian in the climax and allowing her and Marlowe to be together at the end.

  With scenes being condensed and jettisoned almost daily, Hawks was able to rush the film to completion by January 12, finishing with a second reshoot of Marlowe and Vivian’s first scene together, in her sitting room. The picture took seventy-six days to shoot, thirty-four more than the number originally allocated. But as Eric Stacey noted in his final report to the front office, because of innumerable economies impemented by Hawks, the picture was only fifteen thousand dollars over budget and would probably end up no more than fifty thousand dollars over once normal music and post-production costs were added.

  Hawks had come a long way from his original admonition to the writers: “Don’t monkey with the book.” From the strenuous attempt at clarity undertaken by Faulkner and Brackett, Hawks and Furthman led The Big Sleep to a place where the leading characters were surrounded by a darkness in which the threats could be identified or explained only with great difficulty, and yet they prevailed anyway. On January 21, after a week in Palm Springs, Hawks returned to Warner Bros. to do two retakes of Vivian in her sitting room. For the moment, The Big Sleep was finished; final editing and scoring were done, and some prints were made. But more than a year would pass before the film would take the final form in which it is known today.

  After a huge press buildup centered around “Baby” Bacall, which included a record sixty-two interviews in New York on a seven-day promotional trip, To Have and Have Not opened in October 1944. Reactions to her and Bogart were great, and it was generally conceded that the advance ballyhoo surrounding a hot new personality was, for once, fully warranted. But while critics grudgingly admitted to finding the film passably entertaining, the overall attitude of reviewers was mildly condescending and dismissive; they minded less that the picture strayed so much from its source than that it seemed like a reheated Casablanca. Looked at strictly from that angle, it is easy to see how they felt: Casablanca is lush and romantic where To Have and Have Not is hard-edged and cynical; Bogart is beautifully dressed and always in command in the first film, while in the second he is a bit grubby and backed into uncomfortable corners by circumstances; the supporting cast of Casablanca is beyond compare, full of distinctive and colorful character actors, while the lineup in To Have and Have Not grows threadbare after you get past the leads; and the former is loaded with highly charged melodramatic scenes involving truly evil Nazis, next to which the villains in the latter seem somewhat minor league.

  But To Have and Have Not arguably represented the high-water mark of Hawks’s career to date, the most fully realized version of his intuitive view of how a man should behave in the world and how a man and a woman in love should interact. Understated, stylized, and poetic, the film exists on two levels of fantasy: first, as the Furthmanesque exotic outpost of Morocco, Shanghai Express, and Only Angels Have Wings, where characters intensely play out their fates in a contained setting during a compressed period of time, and second, as the most refined projection of Howard Hawks’s sexual imagination, in which a very knowing, yet actually not widely experienced y
oung woman meets an older man, knows at once what she wants, and proceeds to tempt, tease, and taunt him into an instinctive, erotically charged rapport. One may well ask what happens to Steve and Slim after they sail out the door at the film’s end; indeed, their long-term prospects would seem not much better than those of the couples in Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, and Ball of Fire. In fact, if one chooses to take Hawks’s view of the film literally as a speculation on how the man and wife of To Have and Have Not met, then the novel can serve as evidence of their sorry fate. But Hawks was profoundly uninterested in what came after, in the realities of married life and the complexities of mature emotions, and he displayed this indifference in his work by avoiding the depiction of married or settled couples to an extent unmatched by any other major Hollywood director. Until the end of his career, Hawks was almost singularly obsessed with how a new couple sparked until they clicked; after that, he didn’t care. To Have and Have Not is Hawks’s ultimate expression of How It Should Be between a man and a woman; everything prior to it was in preparation for it, and everything after it was in some way an attempt to recapture the ideal he had once achieved. Hawks went on to make quite a few more exceptional films, but just as Slim forever remained the dominant woman in his life, “Slim” remained the ultimate Hawksian woman.

  These notions, however, were the furthest things from critics’ minds at the time. Regardless of what they thought, audiences ate up To Have and Have Not. Opening in an exclusive run at the Hollywood Theater in Manhattan on October 11, 1944, the film grossed a sensational $46,200 in its first week, the second-highest weekly total in the history of the house, and played sixteen weeks, the second-longest run ever at the site, during which it pulled in a terrific $393,000. Warner Bros. held the film back from any further engagements until mid-January 1945, when it began opening in other major cities, including Los Angeles, and racking up huge numbers almost everywhere. It set a new one-week record gross of $430,000 for the New York City RKO circuit and posted records or near records in many other situations. It generated some $4 million in domestic rentals in 1945.

  Given the box-office bonanza blossoming from the first Bogart-Bacall pairing, one might have thought that Jack Warner would have rushed to satisfy the public’s desire for a rematch and brought The Big Sleep out later in 1945, shortly after To Have and Have Not had closed. The first preview of the mystery thriller was held on February 22, less than a month after the final shots were made, and despite a favorable reaction, it was apparent that Bogart and Bacall lacked the impact as a couple they had had in their first outing, because they had less to do together. Hawks at once saw the problem, but for the moment he did nothing. A month later, Bogart and Bacall, confident that his divorce would at last come through, announced their engagement, and on May 21 they were married.

  Wanting to cash in on Bacall’s name, Warner assigned her to a new film, Confidential Agent, in which she was hopelessly miscast as an upper-class British girl opposite Charles Boyer and was insensitively directed by Herman Shumlin. But Warner insisted upon rushing Confidential Agent into release due to its wartime theme and because he thought Bacall was “about hundred times better in Confidential than she is in Big Sleep, and we want to keep this woman on top.” But when the Shumlin picture opened disastrously in October, leaving reviewers utterly baffled as to what had become of the sultry temptress who had seduced them in To Have and Have Not, Warner recognized his error and resolved to do something to salvage The Big Sleep.

  In its original version, The Big Sleep had its world premiere in Luzon, the Philippines, in August 1945 and by October was being shown to American servicemen on dozens of bases overseas. But Hawks knew that further strengthening of the Bogart-Bacall relationship was needed, and he backed Charles Feldman’s approach to Jack Warner with the idea of giving Bacall “at least three or four additional scenes with Bogart of the insolent and provocative nature that she had in To Have and Have Not.” Feldman warned that after Confidential Agent, “if the girl receives the same type of general reviews and criticisms on The Big Sleep, you might lose one of your most important assets.” Warner agreed at once, almost as if the retakes had been his own idea, and Philip Epstein, the coauthor of Casablanca, was brought in to write the needed scenes.

  Epstein wrote twelve pages of new material, almost entirely with an eye to upping the sexual stakes between Marlowe and Vivian. Given that this sort of thing was Furthman’s specialty, that he had been the last writer on the film before, and that he had played a decisive role in shaping Bacall’s screen image in the first place, it is not clear why he was not brought back to write these scenes. The best guess is that Jack Warner had more than a bit to do with the decision. Epstein’s major contributions were two double entendre–loaded scenes between Marlowe and Vivian. In the first, Marlowe and Vivian talk about love, with Vivian saying, “Carmen’s easy—men know that—You have to work harder and longer on me,” to which Marlowe responds, “If an extra half-hour makes you feel more respectable.…” “Good night, Mr. Marlowe,” Vivian says. The other was the famous horse racing–as–sex café scene, which could not possibly be spiked with more innuendo. Marlowe admits to Vivian, “You’ve got a touch of class, but I don’t know how far you can go,” to which Vivian replies, “That depends on who’s in the saddle.” This prompts Marlowe to speculate as to whether Vivian is a front-runner or likes to “come from behind.”

  Other additions written by Epstein were the scene in the parking lot of Marlowe telling off Eddie Mars; Marlowe’s short speech about the chauffeur, Carmen, Geiger, and the compromising photographs; a revision of a scene of Marlowe entering the Sternwood mansion in which some of the butler’s lines were given to Vivian, further beefing up her part; and redrafts of the scene in the hideout with Marlowe, Vivian, and Mona Mars (played by the harsh Pat Clark initially, but recast with the more conventional Peggy Knudsen for the reshoot); the one between Carmen and Marlowe in his apartment; and, crucially, Marlowe’s face-off with the D.A. This last scene, in which Bernie Ohls tells Marlowe to lay off the Sternwood case, was a streamlined substitute for the original one, in which, among other things, the killer of the chauffeur Owen Taylor was identified and the entire plot to that point was summarized. Jack Warner personally ordered the replacement shot to speed the story along, and Hawks complied, but of all the new scenes added in 1946, this one does not seem like an improvement, as the new version not only removed considerable information but erased much of the ambiguity and suggestion about why Marlowe wanted to continue his investigation, just as it further flattened out Ohls’s character.

  In the year since the film had wrapped, relations between Bogart and Bacall and Hawks had become strained. Hawks had long since sold his interest in Bacall to Warner Bros., and when it became clear that the couple intended to stay together and get married and that Hawks had been dead wrong about Bogart’s intentions, he washed his hands of them. Even Bacall’s close friendship with Slim had suffered. So when the group reassembled for six days of reshoots on January 21, 1946, the attitude was strictly business. Nonetheless, with the help of the great dialogue and bold confrontations Epstein had created, they were easily able to reenter the provocative, sizzling groove they had been working in, on and off, for two years. On January 28, The Big Sleep finished shooting for good, and on February 8, the new and final version was previewed for the first time. The feeling that the extra work had been worth it was shared by everyone, prompting Warner to wire his East Coast executives with the news: “in my opinion we have [a] one hundred percent better picture.”

  Whether or not Warner was right can now be judged by contemporary audiences, since the 1945 version, hitherto seen only in exceedingly rare 16mm prints, was restored by Bob Gitt of the UCLA Film & Television Archives and presented to the public in 35mm for the first time in Los Angeles in July 1996. It is impossible to claim that the original cut is better, since the added material produces such intense sparks and provokes such thoroughgoing pleasure. All the same, the e
arlier version possesses a richness of narrative satisfaction, a thrill of dramatic discovery, that was sacrificed in the reshooting and cutting. The two cuts are very different in effect, with the original 116-minute film having been trimmed of twenty minutes to make way for eighteen minutes of new footage, creating a final running time of 114 minutes. A comparison of the two versions reveals The Big Sleep as the indisputable turning point in its director’s career. The first cut represents the culmination of Hawks’s dedication to narrative, to classical storytelling principles, to the kind of logic that depends upon the intricate interweaving of dramatic threads. The revised, less linear cut sees him abandoning these long-held virtues for the sake of “scenes,” scenes of often electrifying individual effect, but scenes that were weighted heavily in favor of character over plot and dramatic complexity. When Hawks saw that he could get away with this, it emboldened him to proceed further down this path through the remainder of his career, with results that were variable in terms of the intent and quality of his work.

  The Big Sleep finally opened in New York City on August 23, where it broke the opening week record at the Strand Theater with a tremendous gross of $84,000; public interest was so great that the house ran almost around the clock, closing its doors only between 3 A.M. and 9 A.M. The six-week run there generated a total gross of $378,000, making for one of the theater’s best engagements ever. Spurred by reviews affirming that the old Bogie-Bacall magic was back, the film soon spread across the country, and through September and October it remained steady as the number-two film in the nation, just behind Hitchcock’s Notorious. By the end of the year, it had done more than $3 million in box-office rentals, making it Warner Bros.’ third-biggest film of 1946.