She always seems a little unstrung in The Big Heat, as if she knows she’s in danger and is trying to kid herself that she isn’t. The Marvin character can be brutal to women; he hits one in a nightclub, and she tells Bannion that he hit her, too, “but most times, it’s a lot of fun. Expensive fun.”
Intriguing, how she half-tries to seduce him in his fleabag hotel room: “You’re about as romantic as a pair of handcuffs. Didn’t you ever tell a girl pretty things? You know, she’s got hair like the west wind, eyes like limpid pools, and skin like velvet?”
Lee Marvin made a scary foil for her, with his long, lean face and his ugly-handsome scowl. If Alexander Scourby’s mob boss seems like a writer’s conceit, Marvin’s character brings real menace into the picture, coldly and without remorse. The scene with the scalding coffee has become so famous that you forget it happens off-screen.
Afterward, when the bandaged Debby turns to Bannion for protection, she bravely still tries to keep up her act: “I guess the scar isn’t so bad—not if it’s only on one side. I can always go through life sideways.”
On the surface, The Big Heat is about Bannion’s fearless one-man struggle against a mob so entrenched that the police commissioner is a regular at Marvin’s poker game. But if that were its real subject, it would be long and flat and dry.
The women bring the life into it, along with Lee Marvin. We add up the toll. Lucy Chapman, the B girl who loved the suicidal cop and is betrayed by Bannion. Bannion’s wife, who trusted him to protect her. And Debby, who likes him and maybe feels sorry for him, and gets her face scarred as a result, and then is sent to do his errand for him. After he explains to her how the widow’s death will destroy the mob, he quietly mentions that he himself almost killed Bertha an hour ago, planting the seed. (Before she kills the widow, Debby stays in character: “We should use first names, Bertha. We’re sisters under the mink.”)
When Bannion returns to his job, reclaims his old desk, is greeted by his fellow cops, and goes out on another case, he lets the guys know it’s still business as usual; as he leaves the office he calls back over his shoulder, “Keep the coffee hot.”
Not, under the circumstances, very tactful. Bannion’s buried agenda is to set up the women, allow their deaths to confirm his hatred of the Lagana-Stone crew, and then wade in to get revenge. Of course he doesn’t understand this himself, and it is perfectly possible for us to watch the movie and never have it occur to us. That’s the beauty of Lang’s moral ambidexterity. He tells the story of a heroic cop, while using it to mask another story, so much darker, beneath.
The Big Sleep
NO MPAA RATING, 114 or 118 m., depending on version, 1946
Humphrey Bogart (Philip Marlowe), Lauren Bacall (Vivian Rutledge), Martha Vickers (Carmen Sternwood), Dorothy Malone (Book Seller), Peggy Knudsen (Mona Mars), Regis Toomey (Bernie Ohls), John Ridgely (Eddie Mars), Charles Waldron (General Sternwood), Charles D. Brown (Butler), Elishe Cook, Jr. (Harry Jones). Directed and produced by Howard Hawks. Screenplay by William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler.
Two of the names mentioned most often in Howard Hawks’s Big Sleep (1946) are Owen Taylor and Sean Regan. One is the chauffeur for the wealthy Sternwood family. The other is an Irishman hired by old General Sternwood “to do his drinking for him.” Neither is ever seen alive; Regan has disappeared mysteriously before the movie begins, and Taylor’s body is hauled from the Pacific after his Packard runs off a pier. Were they murdered? And does it even matter, since there are five other murders in the film?
One of the best known of all Hollywood anecdotes involves the movie’s confusing plot, based on the equally confusing novel by Raymond Chandler. Lauren Bacall recalls in her autobiography, “One day Bogie came on the set and said to Howard, ‘Who pushed Taylor off the pier?’ Everything stopped.” As A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax write in Bogart, “Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking whether the Sternwood’s chauffeur, Owen Taylor, was murdered or a suicide. ‘Dammit I didn’t know either,’” Chandler recalled. And Chandler later wrote to his publisher, “The girl who played the nymphy sister (Martha Vickers) was so good she shattered Miss Bacall completely. So they cut the picture in such a way that all her best scenes were left out except one. The result made nonsense and Howard Hawks threatened to sue. . . . After long argument, as I hear it, he went back and did a lot of reshooting.”
It is typical of this most puzzling of films that no one agrees even on why it is so puzzling. Yet that has never affected The Big Sleep’s enduring popularity, because the movie is about the process of a criminal investigation, not its results.
The process follows private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) as he finds his way through the jungle of gamblers, pornographers, killers, and blackmailers who have attached themselves to the rich old general (Charles Waldron) and his two randy daughters (Bacall and Vickers). Some bad guys get killed and others get arrested, and we don’t much care—because the real result is that Bogart and Lauren Bacall end up in each other’s arms. The Big Sleep is a lust story with a plot about a lot of other things.
That can be seen more clearly now that an earlier version of the film has surfaced. The Big Sleep was finished by Warner Bros. in 1945 but held out of release while the studio rushed to play off its backlog of World War II movies. Meanwhile, ongoing events greatly affected its future. Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944), Bacall’s screen debut, was an enormous hit, and the onscreen chemistry between her and Bogart was sizzling (“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”) Bacall then starred opposite Charles Boyer in Confidential Agent (1945) and got withering reviews. And she and Bogart were married (she was twenty, he was forty-four).
Bacall’s powerful agent, Charles Feldman, who disliked the version of The Big Sleep he saw, wrote studio head Jack Warner in desperation, asking that scenes be eliminated, added, and reshot. Otherwise, he warned, Bacall was likely to get more bad reviews, damaging the career of a promising star who was married to the studio’s biggest moneymaker.
Warner agreed, and Hawks returned to the sound stages with his actors for reshoots. Bacall’s book minimizes this process: “Howard did need one more scene between Bogie and me.” Actually, he needed a lot more than that. The 1945 release, now restored by archivists at UCLA, is accompanied by a detailed documentary showing what was left out and what was brand new when the movie was finally released in 1946.
What Feldman missed, he said, was the “insolence” that Bacall showed in To Have and Have Not. In the original version of The Big Sleep, the relationship between Bogart and Bacall is problematicaclass="underline" Marlowe isn’t sure whether he trusts this cool, elegant charmer. The 1946 version commits to their romance and adds among other scenes one of the most daring examples of double entendre in any movie up until that time. The new scene puts Bacall and Bogart in a nightclub, where they are only ostensibly talking about horse racing:
Bacalclass="underline" “Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first. See if they’re front-runners or come from behind. . . . I’d say you don’t like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the back stretch, and then come home free.” Bogart: “You’ve got a touch of class, but I don’t know how far you can go.” Bacalclass="underline" “A lot depends on who’s in the saddle.”