#The big sleep no more movie#
The recently restored first version - playing this week at Facets Multimedia, along with a fascinating documentary postscript in which film archivist Robert Gitt shows why and how most of the changes were made - reveals not how a terrific movie got better or worse but how, for commercial reasons, it got transformed into another kind of terrific movie. troops overseas in August 1945, and the other, much better known one shown domestically a year later. To demonstrate this idea, take a good look at the two versions of The Big Sleep that history has left us with - the first released to U.S. As Farber once put it, Hawks’s “whole moviemaking system seems a secret preoccupation with linking, a connections business involving people, plots, and eight-inch hat brims,” and it stands to reason that plenty of these connections took place offscreen as well as on. Ellington’s best music and Hawks’s best movies are both supremely about the joy of people living and working together, and our knowledge of the trade-offs - even in some cases rip-offs - involved in these subtle transactions only enhances our sense of the artist’s style and taste. But that no more diminishes his stature (or the movie’s) than the recent revelation that Billy Strayhorn actually wrote a lot of Ellington’s best tunes reduces the composer’s greatness (or that of “Take the ‘A’ Train”). As Todd McCarthy confirms in his new 756-page biography Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, Hawks didn’t even bother to direct the musical numbers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Sometimes this was a matter of setting one player off against another, and sometimes it was simply knowing when to lay out, when to solo, and when to feed chords to another player.
#The big sleep no more how to#
Resembling a bandleader-pianist like Basie or Ellington, he understood how to show his personnel to best advantage. His main idea of self-expression was figuring out who to hire, how to mold and coddle his employees, and how to have a certain amount of fun with them while holding his own with studio management. Most of the time, the film’s energy and aplomb are devoted to getting through its labyrinthine gumshoe plot without stumbling - a notable feat in itself, but more a triumph of accommodation than of unbridled self-expression.Įver since Hawks was discovered as an auteur by a couple of eccentric critics in the 50s - Manny Farber in the United States and Jacques Rivette in France - critical approaches to his work have been hamstrung by his own notion of himself as nothing more than a gentleman jock and journeyman hipster. Unlike To Have and Have Not (1944) - Hawks’s previous collaboration with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, writers Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, cinematographer Sid Hickox, and composer Max Steiner - it qualifies as neither a personal manifesto on social and sexual behavior nor an abstract meditation on jivey style and braggadocio set within a confined space, though it periodically reminds one that exercises of this kind are what Hawks did best. With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone, Pat Clark, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Sonia Darrin, and Elisha Cook Jr.įor all its reputation as a classic, and despite the greatness of Howard Hawks as a filmmaker, The Big Sleep has never quite belonged in the front rank of his work - at least not to the same degree as Scarface, Twentieth Century, Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, Red River, The Big Sky, Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Rio Bravo, to cite my own list of favorites.
Written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman
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