To Have and Have Not (1944) + The Big Sleep (1945/6) – DVDs

TO
HAVE AND
HAVE NOT

****/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart,
Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran

screenplay by Jules Furthman
and William Faulkner, based on the novel
by Ernest Hemingway

directed by Howard Hawks


THE BIG SLEEP
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Humphrey Bogart,
Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone

screenplay by William
Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules
Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler

directed by Howard Hawks


by Walter Chaw
While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to
the two
versions of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep as
marking
the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear
(later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director's affection for
bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have
Not
.
The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war
and sexual sophistication–an island bell jar and pressure-cooker
envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca.
But
where Casablanca's sex was mature and
companionate
(the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To
Have and Have Not
has a slick of bestial sweat to it that
promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather
than in the rear-view. (There's no sexier film in all the Forties.) The
story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground
unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically
non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry "Steve" Morgan (Humphrey
Bogart) and lost American teen "Slim" (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated
helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy
Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence
and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It's not so much a
narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a
director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks's skill in casting
(and it's hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical
enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn
Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at
To Have and Have Not–the first of
Bogie/Bacall's four collaborations–is to glimpse something more than a
good casting eye: it's to witness the evolution of a true musical
genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in-between the words;
to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks's other
collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as
this experience gets.

RUNNING TIME
100 minutes
MPAA
Not Rated
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

1.33:1
LANGUAGES
English DD 1.0
CC
Yes
SUBTITLES
English
French
Spanish

REGION
1
DISC
TYPE

DVD-9
STUDIO
Warner

RUNNING TIME
114
minutes (1945)
116 minutes (1946)
MPAA
Not Rated
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

1.33:1
LANGUAGES
English DD 1.0
CC
Yes
SUBTITLES
English
French

REGION
1
DISC
TYPE

DVD-10
STUDIO
Warner
 

In Jules Furthman and William Faulkner's
script,
based loosely on a portion of Ernest Hemingway's same-named novel,
Steve's sidekick/first mate, Eddie (Walter Brennan), is fond of asking
new people he meets if a dead bee has ever bitten them. It's a riff
that keeps resurfacing, a motif, while a sequence in an Archie Schepp
noise mélange only makes sense if you stop trying to make sense of it.
Eddie (Hawks?) uses it as a test of fidelity, a tuning fork held to the
faithful. It's no accident that the film begins and ends on it. In
truth, the line is the only thing that works as a throughline in the
picture; you look at the piece objectively and it's just a series of
disconnected events bound by the ineffable heat of complementary
personae. (In modern film, Wong Kar Wai may be the closest heir to
Hawks's inter-relational surrealism.) Steve talks to Slim ("Steve" and
"Slim" the names Hawks and his second wife called one another) in
bursts of stylized inspiration: "You know how to whistle, don't you,
Steve? You put your lips together…and blow" is the famous one; put me
in for, "I'm hard to get. All you have to do is ask me." When
discussing jealousy after Steve gets Slim to steal a few bucks for a
bottle of hooch, the lines are close to gibberish, but the impact of
the Bogie/Bacall harmonics is profound:

Slim:
You said 'go ahead,' didn't ya?
Steve: Oh yeah, that's right, I--I guess I did. You were pretty good at
it too.
Slim: Thanks! Would you rather I wouldn't?
Steve: Wouldn't what?
Slim: Do things like that.
Steve: Why ask me?
Slim: I'd like to know.
Steve: Well, of all the screwy...
Slim: All right, all right, I won't do it anymore.
Steve: Look, I didn't ask you...
Slim: I know you didn't. Don't worry. I'm not giving up anything I care
about. It's like shooting fish in a barrel anyway--men like that.
They're all a bunch of... I'm a fine one to talk. The pot calling the
kettle.

Embedded in
their interplay, extratextually, is the dying of Bogie's relationship
with his wife and the budding of his lifelong romance with Bacall.
Intertextually, there's the weariness of a country at war and the
cynicism that comes with a collective cultural deflowering and the
constant reminder that the natural state of man is fallen. Bogie's cast
here and in The Big Sleep as an extension of the
same noir hero archetype he helped forge with The
Maltese Falcon
–the last moral man in a flattened, blasted
wasteland. Chivalric codes are recast in kingdoms sick with war, told
in a thick, courtly language and heraldic verse that reads like a
secret among old friends or lovers. It's Hawks; it's Faulkner, too.

No wonder
Hawks never really dates, because Hawks, in essence, works best as a
channel for masculine cycles. (Small wonder, too, that this Steve
character seems to be the primary source for the Han Solo character in
another cycle mired in archetype: rapscallion mercenary reluctant to
war. The picture even casts light on the genesis of shooting Greedo
through a table.) When Steve decides correctly late in the game–not
necessarily on the side of right, but on the side against wrong–To
Have and Have Not
subverts the high tragic ending of Casablanca,
the putting of the girl on the plane for the good of God and country
and all that, with Steve discovering his Slim back at the piano with
this film's "Sam." The reward for the right thing in Hawks is a
restructuring of civilization around a notion of grails that can be won.

Cricket:
Hey Slim.
Are you still happy?
Slim: What do you think?

The first
fifteen minutes of The Big Sleep are
magical–it's
tempting to get lost in the text, only slightly revised from Raymond
Chandler. The dialogue in this section of the novel reads almost
verbatim like it does in Faulkner's script (Faulkner was one of three
credited writers alongside legendary Leigh Brackett (later, apropos,
the screenwriter of The Empire Strikes Back) and
again the prolific Furthman, who had a hand in at least one other
masterpiece besides To Have and Have Not, Nightmare
Alley
)–save when crippled General Sternwood (Charles
Waldron), briefing private dick Philip Marlowe (Bogart) in his
hothouse, compares the smell of orchids to the "rotten sweetness of a
prostitute." In the film, it's the "sweet smell of corruption," a
substitution one naturally attributes to the Hays Code. Like so many
Catholic-inspired feints and misdirections, however, the General's
equation of orchids with the flesh of men and the stench of corpses
somehow makes the picture naughtier, more quintessentially
noir
in its all its nihilistic, debauched glory. When the
Coen Brothers remade the film as The Big Lebowski,
it's no accident that they portrayed the antagonists as a band of
German "nihilists": that's the heart of the genre, isn't it, the fall
of society and the emergence of paladins, sprouting like white
mushrooms on putrid meat, beholden only to their own ironclad idea of
gallantry?

As for the
rest of it, there's been a lot of trimming. Chandler's a legend and
everything, but his prose reads clunky now, stylized for the sake of
stylization–enough so that his introduction of fatale
bimbo Carmen (Martha Vickers) reads like bad burlesque instead of, as
it does in the film, alive with Hawks's jazzy spontaneity. Like most
Hawks pictures, too, The Big Sleep has had a
creation mythology spring up around it with a sticky half-life. This
one has to do with the mysteriously neglected murder of a chauffeur
character that, as legend (a legend perpetuated by raconteur Hawks)
would have it, no one bothered to question until it came time to shoot
the picture. The various writers consulted and a wire was fired off to
Chandler, who confessed to having no idea. Probably untrue (Rosenbaum's
more or less definitive review of the picture asserts that the original
script actually contains a solution to the mystery), the stickiness of
that story has a lot to do with that the only way to read The
Big Sleep
, i.e., as an exercise in style–the manifestation
of Chandler's stylization, perhaps, literalized for the screen in a
series of barely connected bursts of posturing and genre-primogenesis.

It's a
favourite argument against narrative, and though the picture has a
solution that makes a reasonable amount of sense, the real pleasure of
the text comes in moments where Marlowe looks through a statue's head,
hollowed out to receive a camera. It's insanely rich with detail, with
rainstorms and crazed post-production inserts that saw Hawks and crew
shooting and inserting expanded Bogie/Bacall scenes a year after the
end of production. It lends the film a kitchen-sink feel, kids in the
backyard with dad's 8mm, playing at heat and, lo, sparking. The
chemistry between squat Bogie and lanky Bacall (Carmen's sensible sis,
Vivian) is again palpable–and after Bacall's career took a header
following To Have and Have Not, it's inevitable
that the shelved The Big Sleep (shelved because
with WWII drawing to a close, the studio wanted desperately to dump its
propaganda pics before the market died) would be the vehicle for a
Bacall comeback. As it happens, the new Bogie and Bacall material came
from the pen of neither Faulkner nor Furthman, but an uncredited Philip
G. Epstein (one of the writers on Casablanca, as
it
happens); The Big Sleep isn't an authorless text
at
all: it's a Hawks film through and through–something not exactly
improvisational because it's guided by an unerring ear for
interpersonal heat. Take a listen and consider that only a little of it
is due the words:

Vivian:
Speaking of
horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them workout a
little first, see if they're front runners or come from behind, find
out what their whole card is, what makes them run.
Marlowe: Find out mine?
Vivian: I think so.
Marlowe: Go ahead.
Vivian: I'd say you don't like to be rated. You like to get out in
front, open up a little lead, take a little breather in the
backstretch, and then come home free.
Marlowe: You don't like to be rated yourself.
Vivian: I haven't met anyone yet that can do it. Any suggestions?
Marlowe: Well, I can't tell till I've seen you over a distance of
ground. You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how, how far you
can go.
Vivian: A lot depends on who's in the saddle.

More carnal
than even To Have and Have Not, the picture is
about nothing so esoteric as world politics–boiled down as they must
be in Hawks to tribes of monkeys doing monkey things, albeit things
related to the perforation of the flesh: murder and blood and sweat and
sex.

Prior to the
reshoots, Bogie and Bacall made their flirtation official, and that
chemistry evidenced in their first encounter was elevated from
hush-hush rags into royalty–but chemistry, white-hot, still, the first
viable offspring of their union, Bacall's career post-bellum. The
Big Sleep
is dirty: it's virtually propelled by this promise
of hedonism and smut, from its suggestions of porn, homosexuality, and
anonymous afternoon quickies to its resolutions in downpours in the
dark of night. It's a movie about pursuit and, a lot like To
Have and Have Not
, it's a pursuit with a possible
resolution.
But increasingly in Hawks, the pursuit is broken up into pieces that,
by themselves, don't appear to have resolutions. Mirror shards, each
reflecting a bit of that proverbial elephant fondled by that proverbial
gaggle of blind men–each of them is onto something. Hawks predicts the
paranoia pictures of the 1970s, when hard-boiled became the pursuit of
nothing (Hawks is also the personification of literary Modernism–he,
not Welles, should've adapted Heart of Darkness);
and he predicts the French New Wave, of course, insomuch as the French
New Wave modeled itself after Hawks to a huge extent. Though waxing
rhapsodic about these two films and Hawks takes no great skill, of the
classics I admire, these are among the few I adore. It has nothing to
do with scholarship, but a lot to do with this rumble in my gut and
tingle in my groin.

THE
DVDs

The keepcase releases of both To Have and Have Not
and The Big Sleep unfortunately differ from their
snapper counterparts in no other respect. To Have and Have
Not
,
in particular, suffers from negative elements that have fallen into
disrepair. Grain mars many a nighttime scene and there are a few
noticeable scratches here and again; I don't want it so bright as to
destroy the air of Jacques Tourneur island mustiness, but I wish I
could leave a light on while watching it. Or do I? The attendant Dolby
1.0 audio is fine. "A Love Story: The Story of To Have and
Have Not
" (11 mins.) recalls the apocryphal tale of Hawks
offering to Hemingway that he make a film of his worst novel. ("Which
one is that?" "That pile of garbage To Have and Have Not.")
It also recounts the early days of Bogie/Bacall's romance and the rift
their affair caused between the pair and Hawks, who apparently had
designs on Bacall himself. That tension, that ugliness–I'm speculating
here–infuses The Big Sleep with a good portion
of
its brusque rancour. Next, 1946's Bacall to Arms
(6
mins.) is an irredeemable Looney Tune directed by an uncredited Bob
Clampett that locates Bacall as possibly one inspiration for Jessica
Rabbit. Aping Tex Avery (once a prince in the WB stable, working for
MGM by the time of this short), the cartoon depicts a very Avery-like
wolf tearing down a theatre where a take-off of To Have and
Have Not
is playing. (Magnifying the offense, Daffy Duck, an
Avery creation, has a cameo.) Ending with "Bogey Gocart" in blackface,
it truly leaves no stone unturned. The radio-equivalent of the
contemporary B-roll promo doc, a Lux Radio short from October of 1946
joins To Have and Have Not's theatrical trailer
(which is sharper than the feature proper) in rounding out the
presentation.

The
fullscreen transfer of The Big Sleep is generally
good but, again, not crystalline, though the grain that afflicts the
earlier picture is blissfully absent. Shadow detail is
strong–important given that The Big Sleep is
oneiric–and while the brightness seems uneven, it's not enough to be
terribly distracting. The DD 1.0 audio is just fine. The flipper houses
the 1945 and 1946 versions of the picture on opposite sides, the former
exclusively released overseas for our boys at war, the latter seen by
audiences stateside. A nice little documentary comparing the two
incarnations (15 mins.), presided over by UCLA film preservationist
Robert Gitt, annotates every minute elided (all 18 of 'em) and every
minute inserted (all 16 of 'em). Production notes cap the too-sparse
presentation. Perhaps a special edition is in order? If so, ask
Rosenbaum to do the commentary. Originally published: July 9,
2007.

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3 Comments

  1. Jim F

    Chandler’s prose clunky??? Bite your tongue, Mr. Chaw.

  2. Jim F

    Chandler’s prose clunky??? Bite your tongue, Mr. Chaw.

  3. Jim F

    Chandler’s prose clunky??? Bite your tongue, Mr. Chaw.

Comments are closed