Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (69 page)

According to the original schedule, the picture was supposed to have wrappped by November 28; by that date, Hawks had made his way through not even half of the 195 scenes of
The Big Sleep
. The film was seventeen days behind, and to some extent this was due to Bogart’s emotional stress. However,
physical problems had taken their toll as well: Hawks, Bacall, and John Ridgely all fell ill, while Bob Steele and Tom Rafferty, cast as Carol Lundgren, both injured their ankles. For two days after Christmas, no work could be done as Bogart had called in sick, but the unit manager, Eric Stacey, reported to studio brass that on December 26 Bogart did not turn up because he was “very drunk”
at home, adding, “I really do not feel that Bogart’s condition can be straightened out over night since he has been drinking for approximately three weeks and it is not only the liquor, but also the mental turmoil regarding his domestic life that is entering into this situation.”

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 young 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.