Just been reading, for the tenth time or so, David Thomson’s little essay on The Big Sleep, in which he praises Howard Hawks for his willingness to part with plot coherence in the name of making every scene interesting.
If you’re dying to see what Bogey or Bacall will say or do next, who gives a rat’s ass about who killed whom? Geiger, Brody, Mars. Agnes. Carmen. Harry Jones. Sean Regan. Porn. Gambling. A bookstore (?). They all run together and then vanish—save, on second thought, Elisha Cook’s feisty Harry and Martha Vickers’s nymphy Carmen—as we rivet our attention on B and B, with their erotically tense zingers and loopy, flirty humor.
By the film’s end, when we behold their burning cigarettes side by side in the ashtray, as the two, after having survived great dangers, stare longingly at each other while the police sirens wail, we care nothing about anything except that these two beings exist and that is the most wonderful thing in the world.
It is moments like this—not meaning or moral or symbol or motif—that we will remember. And maybe, on third thought, General Sternwood’s speech, in which the invalid—propped into aliveness by nostalgia and shame, as well as by the stifling heat of the greenhouse where Bogey’s shamus Marlowe sweats and drinks brandy during the initial client interview—confesses, a bit dishonestly, that he seems “to exist largely on heat like a newborn spider.” Any man who reminisces so fiercely—“I used to like [my brandy] with champagne. The champagne cold as Valley Forge and with about three ponies of brandy under it”—is hardly as fragile as an infantile arachnid. The martini I’m going to drink in five minutes, Bombay, very dry, up, olives, won’t come close to the potion in this Sternwoodian reminiscence, conjured among the corrupt orchids that look too much “like flesh.”
“Three ponies of brandy.” Add that to Bacall’s “I was beginning to think you worked in bed like Marcel Proust.” And Bogey’s “You’re the second guy I’ve met today that seems to think a gat in the hand means the world by the tail.”
Right now it appears that these are the things I’ll remember (along with George Clooney’s line in O Brother, Where Art Thou?: “I suppose it’d be the acme of foolishness to inquire if you had a hairnet” and John Huston’s in Chinatown: “I believe they [the fish] should be served with the head”).
Once, when I wanted to be a Scholar Who Knows Everything, I would have been sad over the loss of almost everything but style. Not, thanks to Thomson (and Greil Marcus and Geoff Dyer), anymore. Thomson’s words and Hawks’s directing help me justify my forgetting and the gin drinking that exacerbates the memory loss.
[Hawks] abandons story and genre as easily as one of [the girls in The Big Sleep] stepping out of her clothes, and says this is a movie about being a movie, about movieness. This is a kind of ongoing rehearsal or improvisation—very nicely done, mind you, there’s no need for untidiness (however open in design, Hawks was a precisionist in shooting). [The Big Sleep] is a picture about its own process, the fun of making fun. That’s why it [the film] needs to be all on sets: not as a way of drawing down the claustrophobia, the trap, of Fritz Lang’s world, but as a sign that the whole thing is a game, an artifice, a celebration of acting, dialogue (as opposed to talk) and fantasizing. It is a dream about dreaming—maybe the best.
Is this a description of a kind of movie or a vision of how life should actually be lived? Wish Laurence Olivier, who was really far too British for Hawks’s American vernacular, were here to answer. On the set of the 1976 film Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman, who was playing a distance runner, was jogging furiously before a scene in which he was expected to depict physical exhaustion. Olivier, also starring, approached the young actor and, in his most elegant British accent, said, “My dear boy, have you ever considered acting?”