Quote of the Day (Raymond Chandler, on a Bad Seed of the Filthy Rich)

“The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick…. Carmen [Sternwood] stood in front of me, like a bad girl in the principal's office.”— Mystery novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), The Big Sleep (1939)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1946 film adaptation of The Big Sleep, with Martha Vickers as “bad girl” Carmen Sternwood and, of course, Humphrey Bogart as private detective Philip Marlowe.

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.”

Quote of the Day (Raymond Chandler, on a Private Eye’s Unnoticed Entrance)

“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.”―American mystery writer Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), The Big Sleep (1939)

(The image accompanying this post is from the 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep, with Humphrey Bogart in a definitive performance as Chandler’s wisecracking private eye, Philip Marlowe.)

Appreciations: Dorothy B. Hughes’ ‘In a Lonely Place’ and the Male Predator, Then and Now

This past summer, I started to dip into the work of Dorothy B. Hughes, a postwar American master of crime fiction, for two reasons: for research on a blog post on lawyer-detective Perry Mason and his creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, the subject of a biography by Hughes; and for the pleasure of reading In a Lonely Place, one of four works in a Library of America anthology, Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s. 

Little did I know that the latter would so profoundly and disturbingly explore the vulnerable, resentful male psyche, with more than a little contemporary relevance. 

Even today, more people know of this work secondhand, through Nicholas Ray’s 1950 big-screen adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame (pictured here). For all the great talent involved in that production, the filmmakers still had to pull their punches with the very dark material in this innovative 1947 crime novel.

The problem was that Hughes was one of the first, if not the first, to write from inside the consciousness of a serial killer—a term not even coined until the 1970s. Most reviews of the time used words or phrases like “pathology” and “periodic bloodlust” to describe this new kind of criminal. Her protagonist, Dix Steele, was a demobilized and disoriented WWII pilot, the kind of character only then appearing on film and in literature.

But like many other writers whose works turn out to have enduring resonance, Hughes had also identified a type more commonly identified in the last several weeks, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal: the male predator. 

From virtually the novel’s opening pages, Steele approaches women less as human beings than as prey. In this sense, he resembles the entertainment, media, and political figures exposed in recent weeks as part of the viral #MeToo movement. 

“This treating of the hunt like a craft, the carefulness of it, is one mark of what we often call a predator,” Michelle Dean writes in a recent “First Words” column in The New York Times Magazine. “People like that word because of its certainty, the way it rules on the case all by itself. A predator naturally lives outside the herd, and because of that, he can be very easy to ostracize. The shaming, the firing, the possible criminal prosecution: All of that seems a logical consequence for predators.”

But preceding ostracism, or even noticing the predator’s pattern, is identifying him in the first place, by no means a cinch. Dix has “a good-looking face but nothing to remember, nothing to set it apart from the usual.” No outward sign testifies to his inner ugliness and turmoil. 

The murders committed by Steele obscure a more fundamental link to his contemporary real-life descendants in the entertainment industry, such as Harvey Weinstein and James Toback: not merely the shared male pronoun, but also the assumption of male privilege and power that they feel continually under assault in a new, more uncertain environment. (Yes, even the name of Hughes’ killer is a wicked pun—and a clue into his fear of being unmanned.)

Even as the women’s movement and the threat of sexual harassment lawsuits meant that they might face challenges to their authority, producers, directors and stars such as Weinstein and his ilk longed for the days of the casting couch, when their kind were riding high and starlets were there to do their bidding.

Dix Steele had his own actual experience of riding high. Standing on the beach at night in the opening paragraphs of In a Lonely Place, he drifts back to his time as a nighttime pilot in the European theater of WWII, particularly “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky. There was a touch of it here, looking down at the ocean rolling endlessly in from the horizon; here high above the beach road with its crawling traffic, its dotting of lights.”

But already this feeling of expansive self-confidence is being revealed as illusory. Just as Dix’s aerial triumphs happened over a dim but blasted landscape, his current reverie occurs amid “the pale waste of sand, the dark restless waters beyond.” Above all, there is an enveloping fog, all making for “an unknown and strange world of mist and cloud and wind.”

Encountering fog and darkness everywhere, Dix finds himself all too adaptable to this new environment. He had "moved more than once in his seven months in California," with the very indefiniteness of the number suggesting his rootlessness. With his interior landscape “dark [and] restless,” all he can do is reduce female lives to his own nagging sense of ruin and insubstantiality, a “pale waste of sand.”

“Waste” aptly describes Steele’s life. A Princeton education had given Dix a sense of entitlement without a commitment to hard work. A monthly check from a stingy uncle back east has been secured through the dubious assurance that he’s hard at work on a mystery novel, and he resides in an apartment complex under equally ambiguous circumstances: a college friend, he tells those interested, who rents him the space while away in South America. 

It will become all too apparent by the end of the novel just how unreliable a central consciousness that Steele represents. But early on, Hughes follows him on the disturbing evening walks where he tracks his victims:

“He didn’t follow her at once. Actually he didn’t intend to follow her. It was entirely without volition that he found himself moving down the slant, winding walk. He didn't walk hard, as she did, nor did he walk fast. Yet she heard him coming behind her. He knew she heard him for her heel struck an extra beat, as if she had half stumbled, and her steps went faster. He didn’t walk faster, he continued to saunter but he lengthened his stride, smiling slightly. She was afraid.”

Working within a pulp crime genre dominated by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Hughes subverts reader expectations as much as her novel undercuts Steele’s. Critic Lisa Marie Hogeland notes that Dix never receives an “origin story” to explain his pathology, such as the errant mother that Freudian-influenced psychologists inflicted on a generation of American women. 

Superficially, that might make her protagonist an example of what William Hazlitt, in describing Shakespeare’s villain Iago, memorably termed “motiveless malignity.”

But there is an emptiness inside him that he is unable ever to fill, and his wounded ego lashes out repeatedly in virulent misogyny. Feeling rejected, he thinks: “There wasn’t any girl worth getting upset over. They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore. He’d proved it, he’d proved it over and over again. There wasn’t a decent one among them.”

While the police hunt vainly for this killer who strikes again and again before slinking into the night and fog, the two people who sense something deeply amiss in Dix are women. One is aspiring actress Laurel Grey. Meeting her for the first time by literally bumping into her, Dix is immediately nettled by her cool appraisal: “He stood like a dolt, gawking at her.” She allows Steele to take her to bed, but resolutely resists his attempt at possession.

The other woman is Sylvia, wife of his wartime buddy in England, Brub Nicolai. Even as Brub (now an LAPD detective) searches in frustration for the mysterious strangler, Sylvia senses something amiss about his friend. Her loveliness, reserve, and centrality in Brub’s life simultaneously lure and disturb Dix. This remote object of desire only reinforces his isolation and resentment of all women.

It was only natural that the Ray adaptation of In a Lonely Place became a staple of film noir, because the genre originated in a war that revealed to Americans the evil latent in all human beings, even themselves, and that the men who fought the war came home often unable to express what they had seen to women they had hoped to share their lives with. 

And women, through their entrance into the military-industrial complex in the war (symbolized by Rosie the Riveter), represented, in their rising assertiveness and accomplishment, a new threat to the likes of Dix. Possessing, then repressing, them becomes all the more important. Harvey Weinstein could relate to that feeling.

Seventy years after its original publication and nearly two decades after Hughes, the signs are growing that this lean and haunting suspense novel is receiving its long-deserved appreciation. In addition to its Library of America inclusion, it was also republished over a decade ago by the Feminist Press and this year by New York Review Books Classics.

The new Annette Bening film, Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool, will, one hopes, make casual filmgoers as well as cinephiles hunt down all the movies of the marvelous Gloria Grahame, very much including In a Lonely Place. That, in turn, might make the more curious seek out the original novel that provided Grahame with this entry in film noir. 

All I can say is that my own initial experience reading Hughes made me go the other day to New York’s famous Strand Bookstore and purchase a copy of an earlier suspense novel of hers, The Blackbirder. I can’t wait to start reading it.

Flashback, November 1942: ‘Casablanca’ Becomes Improbable Hit

One of the most beloved movies of all time, Casablanca—released 75 years ago this month in New York—was also one of the most unlikely films ever to become a classic.

It was not the kind of biopic, costume drama or adaptation of a major novel or play that is traditional Best Picture Oscar bait, but instead a picked-up property, an unproduced drama called Everybody Comes to Rick’s.

Once Warner Brothers and producer Hal Wallis passed on the two actors originally considered for the leads (George Raft and Ann Sheridan), they still faced the difficulty of making the assembled cast and crew cohere. 

With no settled ending during much of production, Ingrid Bergman was uncertain how to play her love scenes as Ilsa (although she was certain that the actor who portrayed her husband, Paul Henreid, was self-important). The actress was also taller than Humphrey Bogart, so their size difference had to be eliminated by having him stand on boxes and being photographed from favorable angles. Even that didn’t completely mollify Bogie, who—in the death throes of his first marriage—was drinking heavily and bickering constantly with one of the studio’s favorite directors, Michael Curtiz.

Somehow, in the end, despite its numerous problems throughout shooting, the world did come to think that “the problems of three little people” “amount[ed] to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Casablanca turned Bogart not just into a lead who could carry a film (as he had been since High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon the year before), but also as a romantic—if unconventional and complicated—leading man, even as an international prototype of an existentialist hero who, despite a cynical surface, is forced to act for good amid an evil world.

While his innate acting skill and his offscreen anguish combined to produce the requisite misery of Bogart’s Rick Blaine, we can’t bypass the script. The credited screenwriters, Koch and the Epstein brothers, contributed unique points of view to the final product, including many of the most quoted lines in film history (Claude Rains’ “Round up the usual suspects”). 

But it was the uncredited Casey Robinson who may have made the most significant contribution, according to Frank Miller, author of a book on the making of the film. It was Robinson who thought that Rick should tell Ilsa to get on the plane for the good of the cause.

For a fine brief retrospective of this improbable cinema triumph, what many think of as the “Great American Movie,” I urge you to read Robert Garnett’s excellent article in this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

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