Shooting continued through April on the scenes set in the cellar and the San Francisco Café, with the two big musical numbers, “Hong Kong Blues” and “How Little We Know,” staged near the end. Filming finally ended on May 10 after sixty-two days, fourteen days
behind schedule. The original budget of $1,056,182 was exceeded by some 50 percent, as the picture, including overhead, cost $1,557,655. Hawks received his $100,000 according to his Warner Bros. contract, $30,000 of which had been advanced to him up front to cover some pressing gambling debts. The egregious discrepancy between the two writers’ salaries bluntly points up the penuriousness of William
Faulkner’s contract with Warners: Jules Furthman earned $47,750 for his work, while Faulkner received a mere $5,000, or less than Whitman Chambers and Cleve Adams got for their momentary and insignificant contributions to the script. Warner Bros. issued Hawks and Feldman a flat $125 per week to cover their payments to Bacall.
All along the way, Hawks cagily held Bacall back from the press, carefully
plotting to build public interest in a slow crescendo that would reach its peak with the film’s release. Two fabulously successful sneak previews convinced Warners that they had something special. The studio’s publicity chief, Charles Einfeld, went bonkers when he saw the film with an audience, reporting to his staff, “Nothing like Bacall has been seen on the screen since Garbo and Dietrich.
This is one of the biggest and hottest attractions we have ever had. If this sounds like I’m overboard, well I am.” For months, newspapers and magazines stirred up interest in “The Girl with ‘The Look,’” while, in Hollywood, Bacall endured a summer during which she could find only furtive moments with Bogart, who was with his wife on his yacht off Newport. Hawks was convinced that he had been right
all along in seeing that Bogart would never leave his wife for Bacall. Furthermore, he was so pleased with Bacall’s work in the film that he decided he could forgive her dalliance and agree to Jack Warner’s request for an immediate follow-up for Bogart and Bacall, certain that she would rebound to his sage influence.
Ever since giving the go-ahead on
To Have and Have Not
, the studio had been
expecting Hawks to follow it with
Dark Eyes
, the stage piece that had three wonderful lead roles for women. Initially, Hawks and the intended producer, Robert Buckner, had been intrigued by the Warners’ intentions
of casting Garbo, Dietrich, and Fanny Brice, but this fanciful idea had fallen by the wayside, and now the studio wanted to proceed with some combination of Alexis Smith, Faye Emerson,
Ann Sheridan, and Jane Wyman, all-American girls totally unsuited to play sophisticated Continental “artistes.” Hawks momentarily turned his attention to two other projects,
Pillow to Post
, a wartime housing-shortage comedy, and
Chicken Every Sunday
, an adaptation of a play about a family boardinghouse in Tucson, circa 1900.
None of these projects were suitable for Bogart and Bacall, however,
so, in his limousine riding back from the first
To Have and Have Not
preview, Jack Warner asked Hawks if he had anything in mind. In fact, Hawks had already kicked ideas around with Faulkner and had come up with the possibility of Raymond Chandler’s detective thriller
The Big Sleep
. As it happened, Warner Bros. had considered buying the book when it was published in 1939, but its sordid plot points
involving pornography, nymphomania, homosexuality, police corruption, and unpunished murder seemed to pose too daunting a censorship challenge. Hawks glibly assured the studio chief that, as before, he could iron out any difficulties. Claiming that he already had the first half entirely blocked out, Hawks insisted that he could have a completed screenplay passable by censor chief Joseph Breen,
who had succeeded Will Hays, ready within three or four weeks, and the entire picture finished before the end of the year.
Knowing Hawks, Warner can only have laughed to himself at this rash prediction, but he didn’t hesitate to give the go-ahead, feeling that the Hawks-Chandler-Bogart-Bacall combination was as close to a sure thing as he could get. Chandler at that moment was just entering his
greatest vogue in Hollywood;
Double Indemnity
, which he cowrote with the film’s director, Billy Wilder, had scored a big hit that spring, and
Murder, My Sweet
, the second adaptation of
Farewell, My Lovely
, was already under way at RKO. With Chandler under exclusive contract as a screenwriter at Paramount, there was no possibility of hiring him for the adaptation. So Hawks engaged Faulkner, increasingly
unhappy with his Warner Bros. enslavement, whom he knew would at least be able to break down the novel in a constructive way. But to speed things along, and for help on dialogue, Hawks wanted another writer. Hawks read little but mystery novels, and one that had recently impressed him was
No Good from a Corpse
, written by a first-time novelist named Leigh Brackett with a tough, hard-boiled prose
style. Hawks called the writer in and was, as Brackett recalled, “somewhat shaken when he discovered that it was Miss and not Mister Brackett, but he rallied bravely and signed me on anyway, for which I have always been extremely grateful.”
Just twenty-eight years old, short, and taken to dressing in the simple, somewhat outdoorsy manner Hawks admired, Brackett had spent much of her childhood
in Pasadena, not far from the Hawks home. Hawks was also won over by Brackett’s taste in literature, as her heroes were very close to his own—Hemingway, Kipling, and Steinbeck, in addition to Chandler and Hammett. Having been previously employed in Hollywood only by Republic Pictures on a cheap horror film, she was understandably stunned and a bit bewildered to be summoned by the likes of Hawks
to work with the great Faulkner on a story by her god Chandler. “What have I got to offer? as it were,” she quipped. Hawks was willing to risk $125 per week on her, which was more than all right with Brackett: “I’d have done it for nothing.”
Hawks’s directive to his writers was, “Don’t monkey with the book—just make a script out of it. The writing is too good.” This was willfully perverse and,
if true, self-deceiving, since never in his career was he content to simply transcribe an existing text on-screen. Unlike John Huston, who always insisted on fidelity to the original text, for Hawks irreverence was more like it, adherence to some preexisting literary standard quite irrelevent to what interested him. Hawks was invariably driven—by his creative urges, his need to put his own stamp
on someone else’s creation, his ego, and his entire artistic process—to free himself from the constraints of literature, to spin a tale his own way, to make something organic gel from the combination of talents assembled on a particular picture. To be sure,
The Big Sleep
ended up resembling its source much more than did
To Have and Have Not
, but Hawks’s original instructions to hew closely to
the novel stand as ironic, in that it was he, more than his writers, who strayed significantly from it.
Hawks rated Chandler, along with Hammett and Hemingway, among his favorite authors. He once remarked, “Chandler’s dialogue is in some ways just as good as Hecht’s and MacArthur’s, though it was more limited. He really wrote only about Marlowe, but it was awfully good.” Hawks also felt that
Chandler, who was in his early fifties by the time his novels starting becoming popular, had an advantage in having written most of his important work before he began being taken seriously, so “he didn’t get a chance to be self-conscious about it.”
Due to the august literary names involved, the adaptation of
The Big Sleep
has been far more intensely scrutinized than that of any other Hawks film
except
To Have and Have Not;
scholars specializing in Chandler, Faulkner, and Hawks have all taken close looks at it. Especially helpful is the work of Roger Shatzkin; the very title of his essay “Who Cares Who Killed Owen Taylor?” frankly addresses the issue no one can avoid when discussing
The Big Sleep:
that the plot is so complicated that even the original author couldn’t say who murdered
one of the characters, but that it didn’t matter because everything else about it is so dazzlingly good. If there was a pivotal film in Hawks’s career, after which his storytelling technique became more discursive, more leisurely, and less tightly plotted, it is this one. As Hawks later stated: “I’m learning more about characters and how to let them handle the plot, rather than let the plot move them.”
It could easily be argued that after
The Big Sleep
, Hawks’s films begin to suffer from loose, casual plotting and that their quality depends to a great extent simply upon how successful he is at getting away with it, or, on his terms, how good his scenes are. As Meta Carpenter so astutely noted, it was a risky way to make a movie, the equivalent of walking a tightrope without the net normally
provided by a tightly knit, well-constructed story. It is perhaps not coincidental that the most convoluted, heavily plotted story Hawks ever took on was the one that triggered this significant change in artistic attitude.
Hawks-Feldman, of which Hawks was now president, bought
The Big Sleep
for twenty thousand dollars, with an agreement that Warner Bros. would in turn pay him $55,000 for the
literary rights as well as a completed screenplay—Hawks could keep the difference if there was any. With his impeccable story sense, Faulkner was entrusted to devise the structure, but the approach to the actual writing proved rather unusual. Brackett described her initial meeting with her partner on the lot: “Faulkner came out of his office with the book
The Big Sleep
… and said: ‘I have worked
out what we’re going to do. We will do alternate sections. I will do these chapters and you will do those chapters.’ And that was the way it was done.… I never saw what he did and he never saw what I did. We just turned our stuff in to Hawks.” Brackett acknowledged, “It’s a confusing book if you sit down and tear it apart. When you read it from page to page it moves so beautifully that you don’t
care, but if you start tearing it apart to see what makes it tick it comes unglued.” In fact, it is possible, with some difficulty, to fit all the pieces of the novel together, and Faulkner and Brackett actually went to considerable lengths to clarify some of the details left a bit vague by Chandler.
Aside from conforming the action of
The Big Sleep
to the requirements of the Production Code,
the main challenge the filmmakers faced was to transform a detective story heavily anchored in the first person into a suitably amorous and balanced vehicle for Bogart and Bacall. No matter what happened before, the ultimate goal was to arrive at an ending very much like that of
To Have and Have Not
, in which the audience is buoyed by the
feeling that Bogie and “Baby” will stay together. This
was by no means an easy matter, requiring more than a year of work.
Although no Raymond Chandler novel was designed to be easily squeezed into a nutshell, the original work, a clever amalgam of four of his stories, concerns gumshoe Philip Marlowe being hired by the wealthy, aged General Sternwood to investigate his wild daughter Carmen’s gambling debts. In fact, Marlowe shortly learns, Carmen
is a subject in some lewd photographs taken by drug dealer–pornographer–extortionist Arthur Geiger, who is murdered in Carmen’s presence. Marlowe saves Carmen and sees two men leaving Geiger’s place, the infamous chauffeur Owen Taylor and Joe Brody, who now intends to blackmail her with the photos himself. In short order, Geiger’s male lover Carol Lundgren murders Brody, thinking he was the one who
killed Geiger, when, in fact, the killer was Taylor, who by now has turned up drowned in his boss’s car in the Pacific Ocean.
The classic story that Hawks always told, with slight variations, was that Bogart asked him who was supposed to have killed Owen Taylor (Leigh Brackett claimed that it was she whom Bogart initially asked). Hawks admitted that he had no idea, and when Faulkner and Brackett
confessed that they couldn’t figure it out either, the director wired Chandler, who responded, “I don’t know.” (Jack Warner supposedly later complained about the needless expense of seventy cents for this “silly” telegram.) Despite that, in their first-draft screenplay, Faulkner and Brackett explicitly answered the question by fleshing out a scene of Chandler’s in which the detective discusses
the case to date with the district attorney. In it, Marlowe surmises: “So Taylor killed Geiger because he was in love with the Sternwood girl. And Brody followed Taylor, sapped him and took the photographs and pushed Taylor into the ocean. And the punk [Lundgren] killed Brody because the punk thought he should have inherited Geiger’s business and Brody was throwing him out.”
Hawks filmed this
scene, and it was included in the original cut of the picture that was shown only to G.I.s overseas in 1945. A year later, when the film finally went into general release, the scene was eliminated from the picture, thus leading to the mystery that would forever after surround Owen Taylor’s fate, and to the overriding reputation of
The Big Sleep
as an indecipherable picture.
With Marlowe having
identified the killers of both Gerger and Taylor, it would seem that Marlowe’s job for General Sternwood is finished. However, Marlowe learns that the old man is also searching for the missing husband of his other daughter, Vivian, a man named Rusty Regan. After
striking some sparks with Vivian, Marlowe finds the nude and nubile Carmen throwing herself at him in his apartment, but he tosses her
out. Some time later, Carmen tries to shoot Marlowe but finds that he’s replaced the live ammo with blanks. The secret behind the whole story is that Carmen has killed Regan for rejecting her sexually and wanted to exact the same revenge upon Marlowe. Vivian was, in fact, an accomplice after the fact, having helped dispose of her husband’s body. To disguise Regan’s death, the gambling operator Eddie
Mars had hidden his wife, Mona, away and put the word out that Regan had run off with her. It all ends with Carmen about to be institutionalized and Marlowe heading off to deal with Mars.