To Have and Have Not Review Howard Hawks
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978]
I believe the actually good people would be reasonably successful in any circumstance; that to be very poor and very cute is most probably a moral failure much more an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something bottom men idea them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly accept written and directed motion pictures, plays and God knows what. Instead of saying "This medium is not good," he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, a shrinking, and he was much also tough to compress from anything. —Raymond Chandler (1949)
Raymond Chandler was given to talking things upward in a way that Howard Hawks never has been, but part of what is remarkable about the higher up statement is its aptness as an aesthetics for Hawks' films also as for Chandler's fiction. Even in readily likeable potboilers like Tiger Shark and The Crowd Roars, the hard-edged integrity that distinguished later on and more than achieved Hawks films was already making itself felt. Indeed, in Chandler's fiction equally in movies similar Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings, To Take and Have Not, and Rio Bravo, the mixture of highly commercial genre and sharply individualized intelligence exerts an indelible fascination. Thus, that Hawks should end upward filming a Chandler novel seems more than but appropriate.In a curiously distanced remark, Chandler once noted that Hawks' movie version of The Big Sleep shows "what can exist done with this sort of story by a director with the gift of temper and the requisite touch of hidden sadism." That "requisite impact" seems to accept been overlooked or ignored by near Hawks enthusiasts, but what is of special involvement here is that Chandler sees Hawks' efforts exclusively in terms of the atmosphere and violence that "this sort of story" calls for. Hawks' rendition does describe heavily on the novel, and what admirers of the motion picture might recollect of as moments of Hawksian (or Bogartian) professionalism and humor often are actually part of Chandler's original. But the Large Slumber that Hawks fabricated with Bogart and Bacall is, in some important respects, a separate work in which Hawks and visitor develop some significant variations of their own on Chandler'south territory.
A major divergence between the novel and the movie has, of course, to practice with the character of General Sternwood's elder daughter Vivian, who becomes more important and more sympathetic in the motion-picture show version. Though such changes may have been necessitated by the casting of Lauren Bacall every bit Vivian, the alterations in her role are also very much a role of the picture show's larger tendency toward more sympathetic handling of female characters. But in that location are also a number of other significant additions that accept been made for the motion picture version: The famous double-entendre dialogue about horseracing between Bogart and Bacall does non exist in the book, nor does the final confrontation with Eddie Mars which is the film's climax. Marlowe's contact with the police (and with political corruption) is greatly reduced in the film. The missing Rusty Regan (married to Vivian in the book) becomes an one-time friend of Marlowe'southward and is renamed Sean Regan (not married to Vivian) in the moving-picture show. The flick converts a helpful taxi commuter into a feisty female and a helpful bookstore girl into one who is also sexually aggressive. And the death of Harry Jones is given a very special extra dimension in the motion picture version. The film also adds a pair of additional "couples": twin "hostesses" at Mars' nightclub and two darkly comical hoodlums named Sidney and Pete—who belong to a long line of peculiarly Hawksian pairs and couples. At that place are noteworthy omissions too: Norris, the Sternwood butler, is nobler and less a figure of fun in the book; Carmen Sternwood'south attempt to kill Marlowe is left out of the film, as is any clear sign of her guilt in the Regan murder; the homosexuality, nudity, and pornography encountered in the book are predictably toned downward or eliminated in the moving picture; some of the book's policemen don't appear at all in the film*; and Mona Mars' character is greatly reduced, mostly for the sake of Bacall's Vivian.
In full general, these changes and omissions make the film less misogynistic, less socially aware, and less despairing than the novel. Whereas the book's Marlowe gets sick with disgust over the women he's encountered, the movie Marlowe works his comparatively happy manner through a town which seems rich in smart, contained, worldly women. Chandler not only gives strong glimpses of constabulary corruption, simply as well presents the Sternwoods' oil properties in "waste land" imagery of the T.S. Eliot variety; Hawks' picture show non only eases up on the police, it totally disregards the visual possibilities of the Sternwood oil works. And although Bogart'south boxing-scarred stoicism seems perfect for the part of Marlowe, the movie's Marlowe has a resiliency and self-assurance which stand somewhat in contrast to the Marlowe who feels, in the novel, that he has get office of the corruption effectually him. At the finish, the moving picture's Marlowe has the prospect of a relationship with a Vivian who looks "good—real skilful" in a dangerous state of affairs, while the volume's Marlowe is left solitary with bad memories and two belts of scotch that "didn't practise me whatsoever proficient."
The Hawks/Bogart Marlowe is less of a solitary than Chandler's, though both play the lone-wolf adventurer on more ane occasion. The movie Marlowe has more than pals: Vivian and Regan, with the latter converted into another of Hawks' professionals. In the Hawks version, Marlowe is non but an ex-cop who "rated high on insubordination," he's also an ex-revenuer who "traded shots between drinks, or drinks betwixt shots" when the bootlegging Regan was "on the other side." With the missing Regan every bit an quondam and partly forgotten friend, the movie's Marlowe has ane more reason for persisting on the case when the Sternwoods and the police tell him to end. But the changes in Vivian and Regan too enhance themes of personal integrity and mutual respect that seem a little closer to Hawks than to Chandler. And then while Chandler's Marlowe feels himself sinking deeper into the corruption, the Hawks/Bogart Marlowe clings assuredly to a personal code for which evil may simply be "the other side."
For the moving picture's Marlowe, morality has less to do with the book's wasteland of corruption than with the mode people deport under the pressure level of threatening events. Thus, amid the deceptions that are essential to film noir, the movie'south Marlowe makes strong distinctions between kinds of people, regardless of whether or not they are "on the other side." In the film, when piffling Harry Jones comes to Marlowe to sell information, "one right guy to some other," Marlowe's growing respect is based not only on Jones' insistence on his own individual dignity, just also on his discrete admiration for the beating that ii professional person thugs administer to Marlowe in an aisle (as Jones watches from a distance). And the movie Marlowe views both Jones and the killer Canino with that detached professional respect; both are "good," even though Marlowe takes special savour in killing Canino (later on the latter murders Jones while Marlowe, non fully grasping the state of affairs, stands by). Marlowe'due south contempt is reserved for Harry'due south acquisitive "lover" Agnes ("Wish me luck, copper—I got a raw deal." "Your kind ever does."), and for Eddie Mars. Canino and Mars are both very definitely "on the other side," but Marlowe despises Mars considering he puts people in danger but rarely puts his own neck on the line. Agnes has like failings, though on a smaller scale. Chandler'due south book offers no climactic confrontation with Mars because there Carmen is clearly the murderer of Regan. The moving picture is rather ambiguous about who killed Regan: the likeliest possibility seems to exist that Carmen is guilty there as well, only that Marlowe will try to pivot the killing on the now-dead Mars and have Carmen "sent abroad" past Vivian. Only in whatsoever consequence, the movie'south climax—with Mars beingness sent to death in a trap of his ain setting—makes the question of personal take a chance-taking a far greater moral issue than it was in the book. Indeed, the almost exclusive importance of that consequence in the violent final scene of the motion-picture show seems an especially disturbing example of what Andrew Sarris has chosen Hawks' "distinctly biting view of life."
Of course, Chandler'due south "view of life" is besides "distinctly bitter"; only whereas the novelist gives the states a homo of comparatively noble instincts caught in a whirlpool of corruption, the filmmaker gives us a man of comparatively noble instincts struggling to maintain his self-respect in a fog of ambiguous events. With the erosion of Chandler'southward explicit references to homosexuality, nudity, perversion, and pornography, the movie'due south plot is even more irrational and mysterious than the genre requires. And with murder and motives complicated by plot adjustments surrounding Lauren Bacall's more sympathetic Vivian, the flick's narrative more lives up to its legendary incomprehensibility. But if the moving picture's plot is even more of a labyrinth than the book'due south, the Hawks version has made the confusion into a virtue through an abstraction process on the one hand and through delicate changes in Marlowe's angle of approach on the other. The movie's emptying of the book's more explicit and critical social awareness nudges the story much closer to nightmare and myth. Hawks minimizes the realism in a way that makes the tale less a darkly realistic vision of the Los Angeles underworld than an existential vision grounded in the myths of big-urban center crime. Consequently, the tangled plot serves the film's vision in much the same manner that bad weather serves the vision of Only Angels Accept Wings: equally a metaphor, let'due south say, for a killingly indifferent universe.
The film comes closest to an existential view of things in Harry Jones' death scene. In both the volume and the film, Jones dies when he takes cyanide in a drink which Canino has humbled him into accepting. In both works, Canino challenges Jones in macho terms, needling Jones with the speculation that his "girl friend" wouldn't be afraid to take the drink. And in both cases, Jones announces that he must be "yellowish" and accepts the drink. But in the volume the cyanide kills Jones earlier he tin say anything else, while in the movie Jones (Elisha Cook Jr.) laughs as he chokes to death. "What'south funny?" asks Canino. "Nix's funny," says Jones, choking, and he drops expressionless. No film death that I know of speaks more eloquently of death equally an absolute end which is at once horrifying and absurd. That moment—together with the dull, dead click nosotros hear when Marlowe jostles Geiger'due south corpse—makes the film'due south response to its own championship desolatingly succinct.
Chandler's fiction and Hawks' films share this agnostic view of death, and it is just i of the points they accept in common with a postal service-Earth War I phenomenon that includes Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Hecht and MacArthur; such bottom lights as John MacGavock Grider, Elliott White Springs, and John Monk Saunders; and, to a pocket-size extent, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Seen in these terms, Chandler and Hawks are part of a generation of storytellers whose works reverberate the disillusionment of Earth State of war I and the cynicism of Prohibition while dramatizing a very modern and perhaps unprecedented reliance on personal style and integrity. Theirs is a personal ideals cutting loose from traditional American optimism, simply non from the American faith in the nobility of the individual. Information technology is an individualism which mixes the hardboiled wisecracking of the common man with an aristocratic code of beliefs and an emphasis on manners that has nothing to practice with drawingrooms. At its most simplistic, it is part of the tough-merely-sensitive syndrome; at its best, it includes the varieties of hard-pressed integrity embodied past Philip Marlowe in both version of The Big Slumber. And, as it happens, this individualism is also reflected in the stoical aesthetics that both Chandler and Hawks brought to the pop artforms which they have done and then much to enliven.
* There may in one case have been more made of cops and their ironies in the film version. A still in Clifford McCarty's Bogey shows Marlowe and D.A.'s-man Bernie Ohls (Regis Toomey)—who appears in the film—in conference with "Helm Cronjager" (James Flavin) and "Commune Chaser Wilde" (Thomas Eastward. Jackson). The notwithstanding does not come from any scene presently in the film. —Ed.
2010 afterword: In the late Nineties an before, alternate version of the Hawks film was rediscovered, given express arthouse run, and made available on DVD. Though never released to theaters in its 24-hour interval, this version was seen past U.Southward. Armed Forces personnel in 1945. Among other things, information technology lacks the famous horserace dialogue, and boasts a godawful "Hither's what may have happened" conversation among Marlowe, Ohls, and the two missing municipal officials. —Ed.
THE BIG SLEEP (1946)
Direction: Howard Hawks. Screenplay: Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, after the novel by Raymond Chandler. Cinematography: Sid Hickox. Art direction: Carl Weyl. Editing: Christian Nyby. Music: Max Steiner. Production: Hawks. Warner Brothers.
The players: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Elisha Cook Jr., Sonia Darrin, Louis Jean Heydt, Dorothy Malone, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Charles D. Brown, Bob Steele, Peggy Knudsen, Ben Welden, Tom Fadden, Trevor Bardette.
© 1978 Peter Hogue
A pdf of the original result tin be plant here.
Source: https://parallax-view.org/2010/10/24/hawks-chandler-and-the-big-sleep/
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