Complicated, yes. Impossible to figure out, no. In the 1970s, Hawks admitted, “I can’t follow the story. I saw some of it on television the other night, and I’d listen to some of the things he’d talk about and
it had me thoroughly confused because I hadn’t seen it in twenty years.” But by cutting the one scene that best explained the knotty plot points, Hawks proved good to his word that “you don’t really have to have any explanation for things”; that is what he felt he had learned by the time he was done.
At the outset, when Faulkner and Brackett began writing, upon Hawks’s instructions “we both tried
to stick as close to Chandler as we could,” said Brackett. The writers pursued the joint goals of laying out the story as lucidly as possible and anticipating the primary objections of the Breen Office. In the first draft, which was written with incredible speed, between August 29 and September 14, Geiger was reduced to a straight blackmailer rather than a pornographer and extortionist; Lundgren
became Geiger’s business associate, not his lover; Carmen, of course, was dressed on her surprise visit to Marlowe’s, and her psychotic fury over her sexual rejection was changed to jealousy of Regan’s and Marlowe’s attentions to Vivian. The screenwriters’ new ending had Carmen, to regain the favor of her father, pretending to commit suicide by shooting herself with the gun that was, at last use,
filled with blanks. Little did she know, however, that the butler had replaced them with real bullets.
The revised, “temporary” screenplay was finished barely two weeks later, on September 30, and was the one Hawks used as the basis for his scenes when he started filming on October 10; it had taken just six weeks to produce a shooting script, and if he could somehow hold to the forty-two-day
schedule, Hawks would wrap on November 28 and fulfill his prophecy of delivering the picture by Christmas. In the climax of this new version, Carmen confesses her crimes to Marlowe at Geiger’s house, whereupon she walks out the front door and is gunned down by Mars’s goons. Hawks
was never happy with this conclusion, but private talks between Hawks and Chandler gave birth to another ending that
the author liked a great deal but evidently couldn’t pass muster with the Production Code. This one similarly had Marlowe and Carmen in Geiger’s house, with Marlowe, but not Carmen, realizing that the first person to walk out the door would be gunned down. Disliking the role of “playing God” with Carmen’s life, he decides to flip a coin to decide if he should tell her. He does not, but is about
to stop her when she pulls a gun, ready to shoot him. As she opens the door, machine-gun fire tears her to pieces. Chandler lamented that it couldn’t be used, commenting, “All I know is it would have been a hair-raising thing if well done.”
Hawks had so much confidence in his material, his stars, and his own ability to solve problems along the way that he wasn’t the least concerned about proceeding
without an ending or a finished script; after all, Faulkner had done splendidly on
To Have and Have Not
working barely one step ahead of the filming. Bogart, he felt, looked like his old self again after a summer on his yacht, and as far as he knew, Bogie and Bacall had not even seen each other in at least three months. Over the course of the summer, Bacall had come back into Hawks’s good graces,
taken more singing lessons, spent many evenings at Hog Canyon, and cooperated with the press buildup for
To Have and Have Not
. Though forced to abandon the idea of a liaison with his protegée, Hawks had seen enough over the years to convince him that the Bogart-Bacall affair was over, allowing him to resume his position as her Svengali. In fact, there was good reason for him to believe this, and
Bacall began to fear it herself. At the time
The Big Sleep
started production in early October, Bacall had barely spoken to Bogart in weeks; under incredible strain, he told her that since his wife had stopped drinking, he’d promised to give his marriage one more try. So while Bogie and Bacall resumed their jokey, sparring ways during working hours, the underlying mood between them was much more
brittle and uncertain than it had been when they had begun their first picture together less than eight months before.
Then there was the matter of casting the secondary roles, particularly the women. Hawks decided that one of the ways his Philip Marlowe would differ from Chandler’s was that, partly as a fulfillment of his usual fantasy and partly as a result of Bogart’s screen persona, he would
be more sexually aware and available, as best seen in the bookshop scene, in which there is little doubt what happens after the lovely clerk closes the shop on a rainy afternoon to share a bottle of booze with Marlowe. Another Hawks invention was the sexy female cabdriver, played by Joy Barlowe, who gives
Marlowe her card and offers to help him again any time he needs another “tail job,” adding,
“Night’s better. I work days.”
For the bookseller, Hawks was delighted with a nineteen-year-old Texas newcomer, Dorothy Malone. Hawks said that the scene was never intended to be taken as far as it went, but they were able to do so simply because “the girl was so damn good-looking. It taught me a great lesson, that if you make a good scene, if we could do something that was fun, the audience
goes right along with you.” Like Bacall, Malone was so nervous doing her first important scene that her hands shook while she attempted to get the drink, prompting Hawks to have the bottom of the glass filled with lead so she could handle it.
For the treacherous, nymphomniacal Carmen, the most important female role other than Bacall’s Vivian, Hawks tested several unknown actresses. For a while,
the leading contender was Sonia Darrin, but then Hawks was struck by a glamour photo of a former model and up-and-coming actress named Martha MacVicar. Initially signed by Selznick, she had begun her career inauspiciously at seventeen at Universal in monster movies. When Hawks took an interest in her, Warner Bros. signed her up and changed her name to Martha Vickers. Hawks worked with her closely
to push her sexual suggestiveness to the breaking point, and they were so successful that Raymond Chandler felt that “she shattered Miss Bacall completely.” At some point along the way, Hawks started an affair with her, which lasted for some time. However, she later incurred the scornful wrath Hawks reserved especially for those who didn’t listen to him: after playing ingenues in a couple of unmemorable
pictures, she came to him to complain when Warner Bros. let her go. Hawks recalled saying, “‘Why don’t you just keep on playing that character we did?’ She said, ‘Well, that girl was a nymphomaniac!’ I said, ‘Well, that isn’t a bad character.’ Oh, she was so
good
. Silly dame.” Censorship standards may have decreed the severe toning down of how the Carmen part was written, but the way Vickers played
her, like a lewd, lascivious child ever on the lookout for mischief to stir up, encouraged thoughts of boundless depravity and fully warranted Marlowe’s great lines about her, such as “You ought to wean her, she’s old enough.” As consolation, Carmen runner-up Sonia Darrin was given the smaller part of Agnes, Geiger’s secretary. A sarcastic young woman herself, Darrin was on the set when it was
asked who killed Owen Taylor, and she burst out, “It must have been Hawks.”
For the secondary male roles, Hawks considered H. B. Warner for General Sternwood; Paul Stewart, John Ireland, and George Macready for Eddie Mars; Dan Duryea for Brody; Ireland and Freddy Steele for Canino,
and Walter Sande (Johnson the fisherman in
To Have and Have Not
) and Lee Tracy for Bernie Ohls. Tantalizing as some
of these choices would have been, Hawks decided to cast somewhat against type, with his earnest
Air Force
pilot John Ridgely as the sinister Eddie Mars, the Western hero Bob Steele as the thug Canino, the veteran stage actor Louis Jean Heydt as Brody, and Regis Toomey as the D.A., Bernie Ohls.
Because of his continuing gambling debts and the heavy bite the IRS was taking out of his Warner Bros.
salary, Hawks was determined to make sure his profit participation paid off this time on what he was positive would be another big hit. Going over budget would hike the breakeven point along with it, so Hawks decided to cut production costs wherever he could, beginning with the art direction. Some of the sets, notably those for the Sternwood mansion, were all anyone could ask for. But he doubled
up some other sets, dropped locations when studio substitutes would do, and skimped to such an extent that in some instances,
The Big Sleep
looked perilously close to a B movie, with its anonymous backgrounds and dark shadows hiding the lack of production values.
Shooting in virtually precise sequence, Hawks began production on October 10, 1944. Some of the high-spirited atmosphere from the early
stages of the
To Have and Have Not
shoot returned, superficially covering the tremendous tensions that simmered just below the surface. Driven to distraction by Bogart’s decision to stay with his wife, Bacall saw her severe case of nerves reappear, with her shaking evident whenever she had to light a cigarette or pour a drink. She relied heavily on Hawks to get her through, reinforcing his belief
that he had regained the upper hand with her. But Bogart was still very much in love with Bacall and determined to be with her; the incredible emotional strain of his last days with the desperate, belligerent Mayo drove him to nights of little sleep and very heavy drinking.
Nonetheless, the picture provided a means for the two lovers to once again spend their working days together, and the electricity
between them, spurred by the hothouse atmosphere and the provocative, insolent characters they were playing, became palpable once again. The early weeks included the shooting of not only the sexually charged scenes between Bogart and Bacall but those featuring Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone, Sonia Darrin, and Joy Barlowe—in line with Hawks’s vision of an ideal world, every woman in
The Big Sleep
makes a pass at Bogart. As Cecelia Ager later observed in her astute review of the film in
PM
, “Except perhaps for the showgirls in a Metro musical, there has never been assembled for one movie a greater and more delightfully varied number of female knockouts. But
whereas Metro showgirls at least look content, every woman in
The Big Sleep
is feverishly hungry for love … and though every one of
them would prefer Humphrey Bogart, they settle instantly for anybody.”
Barred, as usual, from the set, a frustrated Jack Warner sent down this immortal memo: “Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop.” The writers, actors, and director took their time in order to extract the maximum character and suggestiveness from every situation. Bogart wanted his Marlowe to be
the hardest man imaginable but found that some of his dialogue was a bit gentle. Assuming that the woman writer on the team was responsible for this, he had a word with Brackett about it, only to learn that Faulkner had written the exchanges he considered too soft. From then on, Bogart went straight to Brackett, whom he nicknamed Butch, whenever he wanted any of his dialogue toughened up, and the
two launched a mutual-admiration society; Brackett said, “As far as I was concerned, he was the greatest actor that ever happened.” Brackett particularly admired the way he could take his final pages for a scene five minutes before the cameras rolled, “put on his horn-rims, go off in a corner, look at it, and … he’d have it right down, every bit of timing, and he’d go through about fourteen takes
waiting for the other people to catch up with him.” Despite Bogart’s personal turmoil, Hawks had the greatest of respect for Bogart and proved it by daring to put him in every scene. Hawks astutely observed that “there are only a few actors in the world you can have in every scene and not get tired of them. But I don’t think you get tired of Bogart.”
During the third week of filming, Bogart left his wife and moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Bacall was able to sneak in to see him. Hawks once again felt betrayed and forced Slim to call her emotionally distracted friend to straighten her out and to advise her not to alienate her director any further.
A week later, Bogart devastated Bacall by telling her—just before she was due to go
on the stage to perform a scene—that he was going back to his wife, who was entering a hospital to dry out. Not long after that, barely out of the hospital, Mayo hit the bottle again, sending Bogie on a bender that, very uncharacteristically, left him incapable of reporting for work; Bogart was normally an utterly dependable professional, but these days and nights were the most difficult of his life.
To cover up for him, Hawks told Jack Warner that Bogart was exhausted since he had been working for thirty-six straight days. However, since Marlowe appeared in literally every scene, and virtually every shot, of the picture, Hawks was hard-pressed to shoot around his star; that day, the Friday after Thanksgiving, Hawks managed
by arranging to record Bacall singing, appropriately enough, “Her
Tears Flowed Like Wine.”
Hawks had just about had it with the emotional turmoil swirling around his two stars. Just as he had during
To Have and Have Not
, Hawks demanded that Bacall come to his house, and she knew what that meant: a major dressing-down. As she recalled, Hawks said, “Look, I’m not going to go on with this. I can’t have anyone under contract who won’t listen to me. Bogart likes
his life—he likes the drinking and he likes his wife—you’re throwing away a whole career because of something that’s just not going to happen.… So you’d better make up your mind—this is your last chance.” A contrite Bacall obediently came to dinners at Hog Canyon, where one night her hosts set her up with Clark Gable, with whom, unbeknownst to Hawks, Slim had had a serious but unconsummated flirtation
during the summer. Though flattered, Bacall wasn’t the least bit distracted from Bogart by Gable. Shortly thereafter, Hawks had it out with Bogart as well, stopping work one afternoon to “straighten him out relative the ‘Bacall’ situation, which is affecting their performances in the picture.” Through the holiday season of 1944, the Bogarts’ marriage was sputtering through its last gasps, with
Bogart making divorce preparations, then relenting over Christmas, going into one of his worst tailspins.