This Day in Film History (‘The Big Sleep,’ 2nd Bogie Private-Eye Classic, Opens)

Aug. 22, 1946—With The Big Sleep, which premiered in Atlantic City, NJ, Humphrey Bogart became identified for the second time on the big screen with an archetypal hard-boiled detective.

Five years before, Bogart had starred as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, the John Huston movie often credited with launching in earnest film noir, a term created by French critics for a genre characterized by dark lighting, byzantine plots, skeptical heroes still capable of hoodwinking by alluring femme fatales, all set amid a violent, treacherous world.

Bogart’s portrayal of Spade—tough, wisecracking, intelligent while scoffing at intellectuals, with a surface cynicism concealing a strict moral code—had thrust him, once and for all, beyond the gangster straitjacket in which he found himself in his early years at Warner Brothers Studios.

Other actors have also portrayed The Big Sleep’s Philip Marlowe over the years (e.g., Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum). But Bogart may be associated with the role most indelibly.

The Big Sleep helped land “Bogie” for the fourth straight year among the nation’s top 10 money-making stars. But the film’s success was hardly preordained. At one point, the actor’s marital woes stemming from his tormented affair with leading lady Lauren Bacall threatened to turn the production into a disaster.

The film would run a gauntlet of production delays, cost overruns, a year-long shelving by Warner Brothers, and reshot scenes before it saw the light of day. It would probably not have turned out half so well but for the careful guidance of director-producer Howard Hawks (whose 125^th birthday I commemorated with this blog post from three months ago).

The movie resulted from the desire by studio head Jack L. Warner for a follow-up to the initial Bogart-Bacall teaming, To Have and Have Not (1944), also directed by Hawks. Hawks’ production company used the $50,000 forwarded by Warner to purchase the rights to the first novel by Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, for $5,000—then pocketed the difference.

Hawks recognized in this material the same quality that led Huston to adapt The Maltese Falcon: edgy characters, surprising plot twists, and crackling dialogue. By his own account, he advised the first two screenwriters assigned to the project, William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett, “Don’t monkey with the book—just make a script out of it. The writing is too good.”

That didn’t mean that changes wouldn’t be made from page to screen. Chandler had included several elements—nymphomania, nudity, homosexuality, pornography, and a main character’s complicity in a crime—that had to be either eliminated or softened to pass muster with the movie industry’s censorship authority, the Hays Office.

Moreover, as Faulkner and Brackett worked on the screenplay separately, Hawks needed to fit the two parts together seamlessly, and—as a producer whose deal with Warner Brothers allowed him to make more money if he cut expenses—he changed locales for others that entailed lower costs.

But these were not even the biggest obstacles associated with the film, which can be seen virtually step by step in the memos, letters and production reports collected in Rudy Behlmer’s Inside Warner Brothers (1985).

After the first day of shooting, when Bogart had downed five or six drinks for lunch, his intake was cut back to one beer at that time of day. But that did nothing to curb his after-hours misbehavior.

On the morning after Christmas 1944, with Bogart not showing up for shooting, studio production manager T.C. Wright went to the star’s house, only to be told by Bogie’s estranged wife, Mayo Methot, that he had come in drunk and was still trying to sleep it off an hour and a half later.

That afternoon, by which time the star had finally straggled onto the set, Hawks drew aside Bogart—who had been mostly living away from home, uncertain about whether to reconcile with or divorce Methot—to administer some tough love. Not only was the situation with Bacall affecting Bogart’s performance, but his co-star’s, too, Hawks said.

Bogart, normally punctual and professional, was giving Warner Brothers fits with the absences and conferences required to deal with the situation—so much so that by December 29, the 64^th day of shooting, the picture was already 30 days behind schedule, with corresponding costs incurred.

Hawks then did what he did best: improvise. Over the Christmas break, and in the lengthy daily delays caused by Bogart, he huddled with a third screenwriter, Jules Furthman, to figure out how to delete entire scenes and secondary sets. By the time it was over, he ended up only $15,000 over budget—a miracle, all things considered.

The plot of the novel had been so complicated that even Chandler couldn’t recall who was responsible for one murder when called about it by Faulkner and Brackett. But now, the behind-the-scenes goings-on took on their own craziness.

With the end of World War II in sight, Warner decided to move up the release dates of several movies revolving around the conflict lest they seemed out of date before their premieres (including another Bacall picture, Confidential Agent). Though The Big Sleep had been shown to troops overseas already, it could wait before being viewed stateside—for a whole year, as it turned out.

In the meantime, Bacall’s agent, Charles K. Feldman, wrote Warner to complain that his client’s scenes needed to be beefed up. Although he had some specific scenes in mind that could be replaced (such as one where Bacall was veiled), he may well have been concerned that she would be upstaged by two other up-and-coming supporting female players, Dorothy Malone (as a flirtatious bookstore clerk) and Martha Vickers (as the Bacall character’s nyphomaniacal kid sister).

Hawks obliged, inspired by his affection for the ponies, creating dialogue revolving around horse racing with the same kind of racy Bogie-Bacall repartee that had made To Have and Have Not a sensation.

Throughout this piece, I’ve stressed the difficulties that Bogart created by his uncharacteristic lack of professionalism. But in justice to him, it also bears stating that he also contributed enormously to the ultimate success of The Big Sleep.

Hawks was in no doubt about that, observing, in an interview ultimately included in Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors: “Without his [Bogart’s] help, I couldn’t have done what I did with Bacall. The average leading man would have got sick and tired of the rehearsal and the fussing around. Not very many actors would sit around and wait while a girl steals a scene. But he fell in love with the girl and the girl with him, and that made it easy.”

Chandler had a different, equally valid perspective on the actor’s quality: “All Bogart has to do to dominate a scene is to enter it.” Because he was in every scene and the action unfolded entirely through Marlowe’s eyes, Bogart’s performance had to carry the film.

With this intense focus on his leading man, Hawks set the template for Roman Polanski to follow nearly three decades later with his neo-noir classic, Chinatown, in which Jack Nicholson, like Bogart, appeared in every scene, becoming the audience’s surrogate in sorting through the multiple deceptions and red herrings of the plot.

Twenty years after The Big Sleep confirmed her hold on the public’s affections—and drew her close enough to her co-star that she married him—Bacall made an unmistakable reference to that film’s General Sternwood by appearing as another wheelchair-bound employer of a private detective in the 1966 Paul Newman neo-noir, Harper.

The first version of The Big Sleep had a logical explanation for its murders. But, while reshooting, Hawks made a discovery that would influence the remaining quarter-century of his career:

The plot, he told Bogdanovich, “didn’t matter at all. All we were trying to do was make every scene entertain. I can’t follow the story. I saw some of it on TV the other night and I’d listen to some of the things he [Bogart] would talk about and it had me thoroughly confused because I hadn’t seen it in twenty years.”

This Day in Film History (Howard Hawks, ‘Great Professional’ of Hollywood Golden Age, Born)

May 30, 1896—Howard Hawks, who developed a reputation as a competent craftsman before being reevaluated as one of Hollywood’s premiere directors toward the end of his five-decade career, was born in Goshen, Ind.

Though associated with a score of Tinseltown’s best-loved, timeless classics, Hawks made little impression on critics for a long time. Holding neither the interests nor the talents of a specialist, he made it difficult to identify what constituted “A Howard Hawks Film,” in the way that some contemporaries made their marks with particular genres or settings, such as Alfred Hitchcock (thrillers), John Ford (westerns, war films, or cinema about Ireland), or Billy Wilder (fast-talking, cynical comedy-dramas).

Instead, Hawks took it as a challenge to create top-flight movies across genres: the gangster film (Scarface), screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby), biopics (Sergeant York), musicals (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), film noir (The Big Sleep), sci-fi (The Thing), widescreen historical epics (Land of the Pharoahs), and westerns (Red River, Rio Bravo). No wonder a 1967 TV summary of his career was entitled, “Howard Hawks: The Great Professional.”

Remarkably, this versatile director was nominated for a competitive Oscar only once in his career, for Sergeant York. (In one of the Academy Awards’ embarrassed annual attempts to honor a film giant before it’s too late, he was awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement in 1974, only three years before his death.)

Yet, in addition to the French “New Wave” critics-directors who began to reappraise his work as an “auteur” in the 1950s, Hawks also influenced such American filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Brian de Palma, John Carpenter, and Peter Bogdanovich (who signaled his great debt to Hawks in his first two major successes, The Last Picture Show and What's Up, Doc?).

Majoring in mechanical engineering in college, the director was less interested in inventing entirely different methods of moviemaking than in tinkering with a celluloid product until it moved faster and more smoothly.

Even if faced with a script with only the wispiest of plots, he’d sit down on the set, pull out a big yellow legal pad, and scribble down dialogue that made audiences enjoy this scene and forget about the overall lack of a substantial story, recalled Kirk Douglas about a turning point in their 1952 western, The Big Sky.

An even more telling example of this is in the sexually charged encounter between Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe and Dorothy Malone’s Acme Bookshops proprietess in The Big Sleep. The plot of the film is almost preposterously serpentine (even author Raymond Chandler had trouble recalling the killer), but the fencing between the private eye and the bespectacled but seductive bibliophile in this scene remains fondly recalled three-quarters of a century later.

Hawks got his start in film at the technical end during the silent era as a prop man, then parlayed some training in architectural drawing at school to land a job building a set for a Douglas Fairbanks film. Part of the reason why he commanded so much respect on a film set was that he had performed so many functions before finally getting a chance as a director: assistant director, casting director, script supervisor, screenwriter, editor and producer.

While possessing his own ideas on how a scene would work, Hawks was so self-assured that he allowed those he worked with to arrive at the solution themselves. He encouraged actors to improvise (as demonstrated vividly and brilliantly in “Self-Styled Siren” film blogger Farran Smith Nehme’s analysis of Rosalind Russell’s performance in His Girl Friday).

Angie Dickinson, who worked with him on Rio Bravo, related Hawks’ indirect approach in this interview for the Web site “Ain’t It Cool”:

“Hawks was tough, because he would not really tell you what to do. He would just sort of get around to what he was after, because, and I finally analyzed it, if he told you what to do it wouldn’t come from you, so he had to make you, through osmosis, do what he had in mind, but not specifically.”

Henry Adams’ terse description of Theodore Roosevelt may be applied just as easily to Hawks: “he was pure act.” A racing car and airplane aficionado, he reminded listeners that the essence of movies was motion pictures. Unenthusiastic about sending messages through his work, he was equally unpretentious about working well but swiftly and within budget. (On Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion death scenes in The Wild Bunch: “Oh, hell, I can kill and bury ten guys in the time it takes him to kill one.”)

Adept at fashioning rapid dialogue, Hawks was a slow, deliberate talker himself. It forced the listener to hang on his every word, only reinforcing his reputation for gravitas.

John Ford, Hawks’ good friend, bestowed on him the nickname “The Silver Fox,” in simultaneous tribute to his exalted reputation as a ladies’ man and his white hair. Though many of his films reflected his Hemingwayesque appreciation for the skill and sang froid required by male professionals such as airplane flyers, racing-car drivers, soldiers and hunters, they never wasted the opportunity to highlight self-confident, wisecracking women too wise to tolerate nonsense.

Three actresses were especially shaped under his direction:

*Lauren Bacall attracted attention in her film debut, To Have and Have Not, as Hawks reportedly based her cool, brassy, athletic persona—even her onscreen nickname “Slim”—on his wife at the time, Nancy Gross.

*Marilyn Monroe took a major step forward in her career by moving from eye-candy adornment to sexy but vulnerable in Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

*Angie Dickinson enjoyed a career-making performance, after only four years in the business, as the traveling card shark who holds her own against sheriff John Wayne through humor, flirtation, and a steely refusal to be wronged in Rio Bravo. (Do I even have to mention that the actress appears on the right, with the director and The Duke, in the image accompanying this post?)

Even after all his late-career attention, “Hawks remained the least understood among the great American directors,” Bogdanovich wrote in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. “But his films represent one of the most vivid, varied, yet consistent, bodies of work in movies; ironically, too, perhaps the most typically American. Which maybe explains why his pictures don't date as so many do, even the best: he touched some parts of the American psyche that are there forever.”

This Day in Film History (Birth of Robert Mitchum, Postwar King of Cool)

August 6, 1917— Robert Mitchum, whose image of anti-heroic cool made him an emblem of postwar disillusionment even as it masked his very real concern for his work, was born in Bridgeport, Conn. 

Mitchum’s list of noteworthy quotes is long and often hilariously crusty (e.g., “Young actors love me--they think if that big slob can make it, there's a chance for us”), and Lee Server's 2001 biography was titled, all too appropriately, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don't Care.”  The actor’s contempt for filmmaking as a haven for bullies and pretenders was real enough. In these circumstances, it was better that he never give such individuals the satisfaction of thinking he cared about the work. 

Except that, sometimes, it leaked out. While directing Mitchum in El Dorado, an astonished Howard Hawks exclaimed, “You’re a big phony—you’re one of the hardest-working guys I ever saw.”

“Don’t tell anybody,” Mitchum said wryly.

Even industry talent who could not overlook Mitchum’s flip remarks or his penchant for spectacular hellraising still found it hard not to acknowledge what he brought to the screen, such as director Don Siegel, who, in a 1968 interview included in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1997 Who the Devil Made It, recalled their work on The Big Steal (1949), made after the actor’s arrest and conviction for marijuana usage:

“When Mitchum wasn't drunk, which was infrequent, I got along very well with him. He has his own inimitable style. It's impossible to give him a reading and one shouldn't, because his delivery is entirely different. I have a great deal of respect for him—I think it's his privilege and he's very successful doing it. He leads a very strange life. Maybe next week I'll be working with him. I don't look forward to it.”

The fact that Siegel thought he might work with him again said something about the actor’s enduring appeal, not just to audiences but to a variety of directors who employed him in a surprising array of roles. 

Before WWII, Mitchum’s famous sleepy-eyed appearance (“Old Rumple Eyes” was one of his nicknames) might have led him to be typecast simply as a hood. But the horrors of a world lurching out of control led audiences to see him as an Everyman just trying to hold his own, and the actor’s own difficult background (poverty in Bridgeport, arrest as a teenage hobo that led to work on a chain gang, that aforementioned pot bust) gave him an instinctive feel for his characters (often drifters and loners) that compensated for his lack of thespian training. 

In particular, in film noir (Out of the Past) and neo-noir (Farewell, My Lovely), Mitchum seemed such an archetypal representative of a world he never made that many would have been surprised to learn he hadn’t been born in a raincoat, fending off dangerous women. 

In the end, consider his range: romantic lead (Two for the Seesaw), alcoholic sheriff (El Dorado), sensitive middle-aged Irish schoolteacher (Ryan’s Daughter), small-time hood (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), and an insolent, terrifying sexual predator out for revenge against the lawyer who helped put him away (Cape Fear). Above all, there is his breakout role as the war-weary but thoughtful Captain Walker in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), which landed him his first and only Oscar nomination. His company commander--weary beyond all measure, but committed equally to achieving his mission and looking out for his men--is a virtual prototype for Tom Hanks' similar role in Saving Private Ryan.

Mitchum passed away in 1997, only one day before his co-star in the 1978 Philip Marlowe mystery, The Big Sleep, James Stewart. The two embodied two powerful images of the American male: one, of the devil-may-care variety; the other, of American decency. But maybe they had more in common than might at first appear. In both actors' films, their American male comes under enormous pressure, and audiences believed instinctively that each was reacting according to his nature.

Movie Quote of the Day (Bogie and Bacall, on Their Bad Manners)

Vivian (played by Lauren Bacall): “I don't like your manners.”

Philip Marlowe (played by Humphrey Bogart): “And I'm not crazy about yours. I didn't ask to see you. I don't mind if you don't like my manners, I don't like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings. I don't mind your ritzing me drinking your lunch out of a bottle. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”—The Big Sleep (1946), screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler, directed by Howard Hawks

Movie Quote of the Day (Gary Cooper, Unnerved by Barbara Stanwyck)

Professor Bertram Potts (played by Gary Cooper): “Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.”—Ball of Fire (1941), written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on an original story by Wilder and Thomas Monroe, directed by Howard Hawks

Today marks the 70^th anniversary of the release of Ball of Fire, which came toward the end of Hollywood’s magnificent screwball-comedy era. Five days later, Pearl Harbor would be bombed, and once Hollywood was done with its propaganda products and home-front dramas, it began to explore in earnest a genre it only began to touch this year, in The Maltese Falcon: film noir that reflected a newfound understanding of man’s darkest impulses. The world would never look so bright again.
 
Ball of Fire would be the last film that Billy Wilder, chafing under the restrictions placed on his work by the men behind the camera, would make only as a screenwriter. The following year, The Major and the Minor began his nearly 40-year career as a director. In the meantime, he convinced the studio to allow him to observe the work of Howard Hawks, whose films he greatly admired.

For all the fast-and-furious action that Hawks packed into this two-hour film about a “nightclub singer” holing up with a group of linguistic professors to avoid police questioning about her mobster boyfriend, the film really can be seen as one long wink to the audience. 

Even the quote marks in that prior sentence represent a raised eyebrow. Barbara Stanwyck’s “nightclub singer” is a stripper, one of two she would play in her long, illustrious career (the other being Lady of Burlesque, based on a mystery by Gypsy Rose Lee, whose pretensions as an intellectual exotic dancer were mocked by lyricist Lorenz Hart in the musical Pal Joey.)

The more knowing members of the audience would also catch on to the film's central satiric premise,  seven professors studying slang centered around one brassy female with an especially vivid sense of it--Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, if you will. 

And Hollywood insiders were probably beside themselves guffawing over box-office champion Gary Cooper--so laconic that Art Buchwald, in one of his funniest early columns, used the actor’s characteristic “nopes” and “yups” to respond to Coop’s own questions--as the chief linguistics professor. (How Cooper got around the formal, polysyllabic but hilarious lines above, addressed to Stanwyck, can only be imagined.)

And how can you not find a place in your heart for a stripper named Sugarpuss O’Shea?

The queen of film bloggers, Self-Styled Siren, has a characteristically astute analysis of what made this film so worthwhile here.

This Day in Film History (Hawks, Faulkner Take on “Pharaohs”)

June 24, 1955—It’s not every day that a film written by a Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize winner gets made. It’s even rarer when the literary lion in question takes up the project after, not before, winning these laurels.

But that’s with happened with William Faulkner, whose collaboration with director Howard Hawks, Land of the Pharaohs, opened in general release on this date in the United States. Faulkner wasn’t sole scribe on the project, mind you—Harry Kurnitz and Harold Jack Bloom were listed as co-screenwriters—but still, Warner Brothers was delighted that the world-famous novelist (in the image accompanying this post) lent his prestige to this movie starring Jack Hawkins, Sydney Chaplin and a young starlet named Joan Collins.

Faulkner’s time in Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties produced five credited screenplays (including the classics To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep), and 15 uncredited ones (including Mildred Pierce). After the Malcolm Cowley-edited The Portable Faulkner revived interest in his fiction, he had little financial incentive to continue writing screenplays—especially if it was one of those epics of ancient times that Hollywood turned out in such regularity in those years, such as Land of the Pharaohs.

But that didn’t mean Faulkner still didn’t feel compelled to write for Tinseltown, at least in this case. The bond of friendship and loyalty to Hawks ran deep.

As late as 1945, when Faulkner’s work was out of print and the financial wolves were not too far from his door, Hawks had enabled him to keep going with well-timed film work. They had the same interests (notably, flying) and could sit together quietly for hours together, hardly saying a word but somehow understanding each other.

So, as Jay Parini tells the story in One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004): In mid-September 1953, after a binge of whiskey and Seconal landed him in the hospital, Faulkner was back home at his beloved Oxford, Miss., home Rowan Oak when Hawks called him from Paris with the offer of a film project: Land of the Pharaohs. The director was so anxious for Faulkner’s services that he agreed to go along with the novelist’s request not to fly to France until his latest novel, A Fable, was completed. (Faulkner family lore even holds that Hawks phoned Rowan Oak eight times before the Nobel laureate acceded to his wish.)

A good thing, too, because within a month Faulkner had collapsed again from another binge.

Part of this might have related to Faulkner’s near-constant thirst for alcohol, but, in a letter to his beloved mother, he also expressed frankly his reluctance to fly to Europe for the project: “I dread going very much, hoped until the last something would happen and I would not have to. But it may not be as bad as I think.”

It was.

Faulkner’s date of arrival in France was December 1, 1953. Hawks waited and waited with Kurnitz, but their collaborator was nowhere to be found.

It turned out that Faulkner, rather than flying to Paris, went to Geneva, then took a train to the City of Lights, where, after an obligatory stop at a bar, he ended up rather the worse for wear, with a four-inch slash across his forehead. Somehow, the confused writer made clear to the cops attending to him that he needed to meet Hawks, and they obligingly dropped him off at the director’s hotel.

Hawks decided that if they were going to get any work done, they needed to get away from Paris, where all sorts of opportunities for trouble lay in wait for Faulkner, so he spirited him and Kurnitz to Stresa, Italy, then to Switzerland.

What came from all of this? Well, it was one of the few failures in Hawks’ long and storied career (not surprising—Faulkner admitted afterward that, since neither he nor Hawks knew any pharaohs personally, he made them talk like Southern generals). Hawks didn’t get back to directing again for another four years. When he did, he was so thrilled with the product—the John Wayne western Rio Bravo—that he eventually repeated the plot twice more (El Dorado and Rio Lobo).

At least the premiere in Memphis, Tenn., afforded Faulkner a nice cocktail party, plus the chance for a swell family reunion. And the making of the film gave the film colony—and Faulkner scholars—lots more legends to dine out on.

I chuckled reading the Amazon.com reviews of the DVD. Quite a few males of a certain age had very pleasant memories of the young Ms. Collins, dressed in the movie with as little as the film censors would allow in those days.

For much of her early career, the actress was thought of as a kind of poor man’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor. Hawks and Faulkner, however, surely must have sensed something different in her. How else to explain, for instance, the classic line they gave her as the seductive Princess Nellifer—“ Even a queen may be lonely”—except as a kind of Vamp-in-Training for her later career-capping turn as Alexis on Dynasty?

Movie Exchange of the Day (“Only Angels Have Wings”)

Sparks, radioman (played by Victor Killian): She wants to know why you like flying.

Kid Dabb (played by Thomas Mitchell): I've been in it 22 years, Miss Lee. I couldn't give you an answer that would make any sense. What's so funny about that?

Bonnie Lee (played by Jean Arthur): That's what my dad used to say.

Kid Dabb: Flier?

Bonnie Lee: No, trapeze. High stuff. He wouldn't use a net.

Sparks: Not much future in that, either.

Bonnie Lee: Yes. We found that out.—Only Angels Have Wings (1939), story (uncredited) by Howard Hawks, screenplay by Jules Furthman, directed by Howard Hawks

Recently, while researching a post on Lou Gehrig, I concluded that Teresa Wright, talented as she was, was miscast as the Yankee slugger’s wife Eleanor in Pride of the Yankees. To evoke the real Eleanor Gehrig—someone less wholesome than all-American girl Wright, more inclined to laugh, belly up to the bar with the boys, see through life’s illusions even while contemplating impending tragedy—you really needed Jean Arthur.

Case in point: Only Angels Have Wings, a film likely to get lost in the crowd of classics released in 1939: Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gunga Din, Stagecoach, The Old Maid…and my fingers are tired from typing these already. But don’t pass up your chance to see this terrific action movie.

In the South American port of call of Barranca, in the early, heroic age of commercial aviation, Geoff Carter (played by Cary Grant, at his most virile) and his crew of daredevil pilots live on the cusp of danger, trying to negotiate tricky mountain passes perpetually shrouded in fog.

But they also live in a close communion in which wisecracks and looking out for each other make for a kind of masculine paradise. It’s the kind of Eden, with thoughts unspoken but still understood, without a woman to introduce disruptive passions, that exists for Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway. (Instead of taking a crack at Papa’s melancholy take on the Lost Generation—one that, admittedly, might have posed censorship issues at the time—Howard Hawks tackled one of the novelist’s worst, To Have and Have Not.)

Change the phrase “novel-writing” to “filmmaking,” and I think Hawks would have let loose with a loud, oath-accompanied “Amen!” to this observation by novelist Willkie Collins in the 1861 edition of his Victorian thriller, The Woman in White: “It may be possible, in novel-writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters; their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told.”

In other words, the magic of this film doesn’t lie in special effects but in characters we come to care about, driven to their respective fates. The Sheila Variations has a great post on just one scene illustrating this.

Grant being Grant, there isn’t a woman who gets stuck in this godforsaken place who doesn’t swoon at the sight of him—or, in the case of Rita Hayworth, playing a former flame of his, hasn’t done so already. With her hard drinking, clever retorts and hard-bitten attitude toward fate, Arthur’s stranded showgirl Bonnie Lee would seem a natural for this masculine crowd.

But that catch in Arthur’s throat—one used, over the years, in vehicles as diverse as screwball comedies (Easy Living), populist Capracorn (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), and westerns (Shane)—gives the game away. She’s stuck on Grant, which complicates life for him—something he can’t abide, since he has enough problems with getting the job done and making sure his crew survives till tomorrow.

So rent this to experience the best of character-driven action, or to savor the filmography of the versatile Hawks, or, as many people prefer, to catch the incomparable Grant as, still relatively early in his career, he crafts his persona of the effortlessly attractive, endlessly wry, deeply woman-weary hero.

But watch it, too, for the other great actors—not just Arthur, but Thomas Mitchell, as the visually impaired friend that Grant watches more like a mother hen than a hard-driving, results-oriented boss.

Somebody tell me—did any other character actor besides Mitchell appear in so many all-time great films in a single year? Count them—not just this, but also Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gone With the Wind, and the film that netted him his highly deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Stagecoach.