You have to have your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes.
—The Big Sleep
The kid said: “I don’t like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don’t like them getting drunk here, and in the third place I don’t like them in the first place.”
“Warner Brothers could use that,” I said.
“They did.”
—“Red Wind”
The star was a bad-tempered brunette with contemptuous eyes and a couple of bad close-ups that showed her pushing forty-five backwards almost hard enough to break a wrist.
—The Little Sister
Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver’s shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunchbox. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blasé and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture mover in a sweaty undershirt.
—The Little Sister
“Screen stars, phooey. The veterans of a thousand beds.”
—Marlowe in The Little Sister
In Hollywood anything can happen, anything at all.
—The Long Goodbye
One thing that was happening while Chandler was occupied with The Blue Dahlia was the film version of The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks for Warner Bros. and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Dick Powell plays Marlowe opposite Claire Trevor in Murder, My Sweet, released abroad as Farewell, My Lovely (1944). (illustrations credit 6.15)
It was not the first film version of a Chandler novel—simply the best.
Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window had already been sold to RKO and 20th Century Fox respectively, only to be turned into standard episodes of ongoing B-picture series.
Farewell, My Lovely became the 1942 The Falcon Takes Over, a starring vehicle for George Sanders and itself a rip-off of The Saint series; while The High Window became the 1942 Time to Kill with Lloyd Nolan as the series character Michael Shayne.
But with the success of Double Indemnity Raymond Chandler was suddenly a hot property, and some rapid studio rethinking went on. RKO still had the rights to Farewell, My Lovely and quickly remade it, giving Dick Powell—a fading star of 1930s Warner musicals—his first dramatic role and effectively relaunching his career. In their wisdom they decided the title would not do—it might suggest another Powell musical—so it was retitled (in the U.S., at least) Murder, My Sweet and released in 1944.
It was a much better effort than the first one and remarkably faithful to the original novel, even though it suffered the by now expected slings and arrows of the Production Code. Some of the violence had to be toned down, but director Edward Dmytryk caught Marlowe’s “voice” by the simple expedient of using a good deal of voice-over first-person narrative taken from the text …
“OK, Marlowe,” I said to myself. “You’re a tough guy. You’ve been sapped twice, choked, beaten silly with a gun, shot in the arm until you’re crazy as a couple of waltzing mice. Now let’s see you do something really tough—like putting your pants on.”
Chandler liked the film and Powell as Marlowe; although the actor would not have been his first choice, he would say later that Powell was the closest of the screen Marlowes to his original conception. He had originally seen Cary Grant in the role—just as Ian Fleming was to have Grant in mind for James Bond some years later.
Nevertheless, he was perfectly happy when Warner Bros. used their own contract star, Humphrey Bogart, for their version of The Big Sleep. Bogart was riding high after a succession of romantic tough guy roles—High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), To Have and Have Not (1944)—and The Big Sleep reunited him with director Howard Hawks and costar Lauren Bacall, soon to be his wife.
Bogart—Chandler felt—was
the genuine article … He can be tough without a gun … Bogart is superb as Bogart … Also he has a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt. Ladd is hard, bitter and occasionally charming, but he is after all a small boy’s idea of a tough guy.
“When and if you see The Big Sleep,” he wrote to Hamish Hamilton, “you will realize what can be done with this sort of story by a director with a gift of atmosphere and the requisite touch of hidden sadism.”
Bogart was intrigued by Marlowe but had one question for Chandler. Why didn’t Marlowe go overboard for the girl? Chandler had an answer for him:
Marlowe would lose something by being promiscuous. I know he can’t go on forever saying no the way he does—the guy’s human—he’ll have to break sometime but I’ve never wanted the sex bit to dominate either him or the story.
His contract with Paramount prohibited Chandler from being involved in the film but he and Hawks got to know each other and met regularly. There is a story about the shoot, which many consider apochryphal but which is almost certainly true.
Howard Hawks (1896–1977), director of The Big Sleep. Photofest (illustrations credit 6.16)
The Lady in the Lake (1946). Director and star Robert Montgomery experimented with the I-am-a-camera technique. Audiences saw Montgomery’s face only when he looked in a mirror. Costar Audrey Totter shows Marlowe the results of a run-in with some unfriendly individuals. Photofest (illustrations credit 6.17)
Hawks and his scriptwriters—William Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett—were getting confused by the book’s plot, even though they were managing to incorporate a substantial amount of the book into their screenplay. One day Hawks cabled Chandler to ask who, in fact, had killed the Sternwoods’ chauffeur. Chandler cabled back: “NO IDEA.” It was an answer that tied in with his basic philosophy of the genre in which he worked. He was interested, he said, in “what happened, rather than whodunit.”
Hawks came up with a nice in-joke during the film. In one scene Marlowe goes to a public library. While he is there a sweet young librarian suggests he read an excellent new thriller that has just come in … “Raymond Chandler’s latest. What a picture that’ll make.”
The Big Sleep was a huge box office success and Warner Bros. made a nice profit on their $10,000 investment. Something of Marlowe rubbed off on Bogart for the rest of his career, and at least one of Chandler’s handful of novels received a definitive film treatment.
Chandler himself moved from The Blue Dahlia to an assignment for MGM. He was to work on the film version of Lady in the Lake.
It was not a happy experience. MGM was more bureaucratically run than Paramount and it didn’t take as kindly to being told to go to hell. The pressures to conform were so irksome and the task of adaptation so tedious—he even resorted to putting in scenes that weren’t in the book—that after three months’ desultory work he gave up and walked out. It was “just turning over dry bones.”
Director and star Robert Montgomery decided to shoot the film with an I-am-a-camera technique, so that the viewer would see only what Marlowe saw. In more experienced directorial hands it might have worked passably well, but with Montgomery it merely seemed an affectation. To Chandler it was “old stuff.” “Let’s make the camera a character; it’s been said at every lunch table in Hollywood one time or another.” He refused to accept screen credit.
Despite his reputation for being “difficult”—or perhaps because of it—the Hollywood studios continued to beat a path to his door. Paramount had to write off another large sum as yet another project failed to hold his attention. Sam Goldwyn tried to persuade him to return to MGM, and that encounter at least amused him. (“I suppose everyone ought to meet Samuel Goldwyn this side of Paradise.”)
His most effective film writing at this stage—late 1945—was about film writing.
What Hollywood seems to want is a writer who is ready to commit sui
cide in every story conference. What it actually gets is the fellow who screams like a stallion in heat and then cuts his throat with a banana. The scream demonstrates the artistic purity of his soul and he can eat the banana while somebody is answering a telephone call about some other picture …
—“Hollywood and the Screen Writer”
In 1946 Chandler left Hollywood. He and Cissy moved back to La Jolla. It was time to get back to his novels. He wrote to Alfred Knopf (January 12, 1946):
[Hollywood is] a sweet subject for a novel—probably the greatest still untouched …
It is like one of those South American palace revolutions conducted by officers in comic opera uniforms—only when the thing is over the ragged men lie in rows against the wall, and you suddenly know that this is not funny, this is the Roman Circus, and damn near the end of civilization.
“Money is no longer a compelling motive, unless I could make it by writing books. If I can’t, I can always make it in the Hollywood slaughter house, ankle-deep in blood and screaming like a Saracen.”
—Letter to John Hersey—March 29, 1948
It was to be au revoir and not goodbye, as things turned out. In 1950 he was offered $2,500 a week by Warner Bros. to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s novel Strangers on a Train for Alfred Hitchcock to direct.
Why am I doing it? Partly because I thought I might like Hitch, which I do, and partly because one gets tired of saying no, and someday I might want to say yes and not get asked.
In theory it should have worked out well. Two expatriate “Englishmen” who had learned to deal with Americans; both masters of suspense. But therein lay the problem. Chandler found Hitchcock “as nice as can be to argue with” but he also found him intractable. A Hitchcock film would always be a “Hitchcock film.”
One thing that amuses me about Hitchcock is the way he directs a film in his head before he knows what the story is. You find yourself trying to rationalize the shots he wants to make rather than the story. Every time you get set he jabs you off balance by wanting to do a love scene on top of the Jefferson Memorial or something like that.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—September 4, 1950
This time, before Chandler could walk, he was pushed. Hitchcock fired him. Two creative voices—particularly these two—were one too many. Chandler received $40,000 for his contribution and reluctantly accepted co-writing credit on the finished picture, which he described as “no guts, no characters, no plausability [sic], and no dialogue … but of course it’s Hitchcock, and a Hitchcock film always does have something.”
“I don’t know why it’s a success, perhaps because Hitchcock succeeded in removing almost every trace of my writing from it.”
The screenplay he had turned in—he rationalized later—“had too much Chandler in it and not enough Hitchcock.” It was rewritten by one Czenzi Ormonde.
But the experience clearly bothered him. In November he wrote to Finley McDermid:
Are you aware that this screenplay was written without one single consultation with Mr. Hitchcock after the writing of the screenplay began? Not even a telephone call. Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence then and since. You are much too clever a man to believe that any writer will do his best in conditions like this. There are always things that need to be discussed. There are always places where a writer goes wrong, not being himself a master of the camera. There are always difficult little points which require the meeting of the minds, the accommodation of points of view. I had none of this. I find it rather strange. I find it rather ruthless. I find it almost incomparably rude.
Two strangers—Farley Granger and Robert Walker—meet in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). Photofest (illustrations credit 6.18)
Hitchcock—not surprisingly—remembered rather differently: “Our association didn’t work out at all. We’d sit together and I would say—‘Why not do it this way?’—and he’d answer—‘Well, if you can puzzle it out, what do you need me for?’ The work he did was no good and I ended up with Czenzi Ormonde, a woman writer who was one of Ben Hecht’s assistants. When I completed the treatment, the head of Warner’s tried to get someone to do the dialogue and very few writers would touch it” (Hitchcock/Truffaut).
But perhaps the real reason was that Chandler and Hitchcock had a fundamental difference of approach to this kind of material.
Hitchcock was the acknowledged master of “suspense” but Chandler felt that “suspense as an absolute quality has never seemed to me to be very important. At best it is a secondary growth, and at worst an attempt to make something out of nothing.”
The film opens at the entrance of Union Station, Washington, D.C., with the usual bustle of a major terminal.
A taxi draws up. We see a porter being handed some luggage—among it several tennis rackets. The passenger gets out but we only see his shoes—dark brogues. We follow him as he begins to walk into the station.
A limousine now draws up and the pattern is repeated. This time the luggage is more impressive and the shoes a rather sporty black and white. They also walk into the station and we follow.
On the train they arrive more or less simultaneously in the parlor car and their owners take their seats. As they do, one of the sports shoes accidentally brushes against a brogue. As the owner of the sports shoe apologizes, the camera moves up to show the two owners of the shoes.
The sports shoes belong to Bruno Anthony, a young man in his mid-twenties who now recognizes his traveling companion as Guy Haines, a well-known tennis player.
Guy is a private sort of person with no wish to indulge in casual conversation with strangers.
Bruno, on the other hand, is the gregarious type. He tells Guy he knows him from the gossip columns: he’s the secretary to a senator and rumor has it that he’s to marry the senator’s daughter. Guy points out that he is already married and tries to break off the conversation but Bruno will have none of it. He insists they have a drink.
He orders from the waiter, then takes out a cigarette, fumbles in his pocket but can’t find a match.
Guy offers him his lighter, which, after lighting his cigarette, Bruno examines, seeing the distinctive symbol of a tennis club embossed on it next to the name GUY HAINES. He holds it rather longer than necessary but finally hands it back.
Worn down by Bruno’s persistence, Guy admits that a divorce is indeed likely. He’s on his way right now to discuss it with his wife before he goes on to a major tournament.
Bruno insists they have lunch in his compartment and we find them there after the meal. Bruno is by now a little worse for wear after a couple of drinks. He picks up Guy’s lighter to light another cigarette and again takes his time returning it. It clearly fascinates him.
He has persuaded a reluctant Guy to talk about his failed marriage, and now Bruno begins to elaborate a little excitedly on what Guy has said. Clearly, to his mind, Miriam—Guy’s wife—is a “tramp” … like all women. Someone should get rid of her.
This is too much for Guy and he makes as if to leave. Bruno quickly apologizes for being presumptuous to someone he barely knows. He then goes on to discuss his own family situation—a mother he adores and a father he hates—both to the point of obsession. A sudden inspiration strikes him. He and Guy have something in common after all. A problem person. Guy has his wife and he has his father. If only the problem people were to be murdered. Murder would be fun, don’t you think, Guy?
What Guy thinks is that Bruno is drunk, and he can’t wait to end the conversation politely.
Bruno is now on a dangerous high. He begins to elaborate. Why not swap murders? He’ll kill Miriam and Guy can kill Bruno’s father. Criss-cross. Two murders by strangers without a motive. Foolproof.
The train comes into a station and Guy leaves, relieved.
Bruno remains seated. He takes Guy’s lighter out of his pocket and flicks it on and off thoughtfully.
End of scene.
Chandler and Hitchcock may not have seen eye to eye,
but there was a moment when Chandler demonstrated the “Hitchcock Touch.” Hitchcock was famous for liking to make a cameo appearance in his films as a “walk-on” extra. In Double Indemnity there’s a scene between Neff and Keyes in Keyes’s office. Neff leaves and turns left outside the door. As he begins to walk along the corridor, he passes a bench on which a man is sitting … Raymond Chandler.
After approximately five years of working for Hollywood, I know that I wasn’t meant to be a screenwriter … I am not trying to knock the art or profession of writing for the screen. This has to do with my private conception of what writing is, and what a writer is entitled to get out of his work, other than money. It has to do with magic and emotion and vision, with the free flow of images, thoughts and ideas, with discipline that comes from within and is not imposed from without … It has to do with that rare facility of expression which has nothing to do with conscious technique, since technique bears the same relation to it as a grammarian does to a poet … Without magic there is no art.
I am not a sole screenplay writer, if by this crack is meant a creative artist who can all by himself produce a clean and wholesome shooting script which, as it stands, will satisfy all concerned and fill them with jubilation. I am just not that good. At the risk of being thought a cad, may I ask who is?
Hollywood’s failure to find an enlightened way of dealing with creative people is no longer merely a matter of bruised egos. It is a failure of a method of making pictures, and the results of this failure are showing up at the box office.
The World of Raymond Chandler Page 13