43 CMBA Blogathon: The Big Sleep (1946)

****
Country: US
Director: Howard Hawks

When the Classic Movie Blog Association announced that the topic of their February blogathon would be the Fabulous Films of the 1940s, I knew almost immediately which film I wanted to write about. For me Humphrey Bogart is the preeminent American actor of the forties, and nothing in American film of the forties captures the postwar zeitgeist of that decade like film noir. So I quickly narrowed down the possibilities to the movies in which those two forces, Bogart and film noir, converge. Throw Lauren Bacall, Howard Hawks, and Raymond Chandler into the mix, and one film stood apart from the rest: The Big Sleep from 1946.

Published in 1939, Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep features as its protagonist and narrator one of the great characters of detective fiction, private investigator Philip Marlowe. Although The Big Sleep was the first novel Chandler wrote, the 1946 movie directed by Howard Hawks wasn't the first film version of a Philip Marlowe novel. Two of the books were loosely adapted as installments in the Falcon and Michael Shayne series of B-movies—Farewell, My Lovely as The Falcon Takes Over (1942) and The High Window as Time to Kill (1942). Nor was Bogart the first person to play Philip Marlowe. In 1944 Farewell, My Lovely was filmed by RKO under the title Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell as Marlowe. (It was Powell's first dramatic film, and the studio was afraid the original title might lead audiences to expect a musical romance.) Several other actors would go on to play Chandler's archetypal hard-boiled private eye, but as good as some of those were—in particular Powell, and many years later Robert Mitchum—for me Humphrey Bogart will always be the definitive Philip Marlowe, just as The Big Sleep will always be for me the definitive Philip Marlowe movie.

The first half hour or so of The Big Sleep follows Chandler's novel closely, with much of the dialogue, settings, action, and even the behavioral quirks of the characters taken directly from the book. Private detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is summoned to the mansion of an ailing elderly millionaire, General Sternwood. The general is the father of two spoiled tearaway daughters in their twenties, Vivian (Lauren Bacall) and Carmen (Martha Vickers). The younger daughter Carmen is actually quite a bit more than that—a thumb-sucking, drug-addicted nymphomaniac—and the general wants Marlowe to deal with an attempt to blackmail him over Carmen's scandalous behavior. At the same time, he speaks wistfully to Marlowe about a young confidant of his, a former Prohibition rum-runner named Sean Regan, who has been missing for a month. The general's older daughter Vivian also seems for some reason interested in the disappearance of Regan, and even though Marlowe hasn't been hired to find Regan, his curiosity and suspicion are aroused to the point that he begins to investigate this on his own.

From this point on, the movie follows the novel much less closely. The screenplay retains many elements of the novel's plot but reorganizes them, often using these as a starting point but altering them freely and using them in its own way. One reason for these alterations is that the novel deals with subjects which under the Production Code could never have been used in a movie—among other things homosexuality, drugs, pornography, and police corruption (which Chandler presents as pervasive). Some of these things are hinted at in the film but could be difficult to spot unless you've read the novel, and there's no doubt that the necessary coyness about these subjects compromises the plot's coherence. The screenwriters—there were three credited writers, William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett—do, however, manage to preserve the flippant, hard-edged spirit of Chandler's novel.

The version of The Big Sleep we are familiar with, released in August 1946, is not the only version of the film. Most of the film was shot between late 1944 and early 1945. But Warners held off releasing it so that Lauren Bacall's next film, Confidential Agent, could be rushed into release before the end of World War II made the wartime theme of Confidential Agent unappealing to war-weary moviegoers. This delay gave the studio and Hawks time to reconsider The Big Sleep in light of the huge popularity of Bogart and Bacall the year before in Hawks's To Have and Have Not. The screenwriters had already added to Chandler's plot a romance between the characters played by Bogart and Bacall (in the book there is no romance between them and in fact Bacall's character is married to the missing Sean Regan) and also had written Bacall into the film's climactic sequence. The upshot of the film's delayed release was the decision to beef up even further Bacall's part and the romantic encounters in the film between her and Bogart. To accomplish this, the screenwriter and script doctor Philip G. Epstein was brought in to revise scenes and write additional scenes, uncredited, which were filmed a year after the original shoot.

The first or pre-release version of The Big Sleep was shown in 1945 to U.S. soldiers overseas, but that version was largely forgotten until it was restored in 35mm by the UCLA Film & Television Archives in 1996. Both versions are included on the DVD of the film released by Warner Home Video in 2006, and they make a fascinating comparison. Although it trims and tweaks individual scenes here and there, the release version pretty much follows the narrative organization of the pre-release version. There are two major differences, though, and in both cases they are clear improvements.

An entire five-minute long sequence in the middle of the film that takes place in the District Attorney's office was eliminated. In this scene Marlowe does explain to the D.A. what has happened so far, but he doesn't include any information an observant viewer wouldn't already be aware of. Contrary to some accounts I've read, he doesn't explain the one murder that nobody involved in the film could figure out who was responsible for. (This is the murder of the Sternwoods' chauffeur, which to be fair, was never accounted for in the novel. This probably explains why Chandler, when consulted by Hawks about this point, is famously said to have replied that he didn't know who the killer was either.) The release version substitutes for the scene in the D.A.'s office an entirely new scene between Bogart and Bacall in a restaurant. The new sequence not only gives them more screen time together (as well as softening Bacall's character a bit and making her seem less aloof), but also ramps up the sexual attraction between them. This in turn makes the romantic resolution at the end seem less contrived and hasty than in the pre-release version.

The restaurant scene in the release version

Even better is an expanded and reshot sequence in the middle of the film involving an encounter between Bogart and Bacall in Marlowe's office. In the shorter original version, Bacall wears a dowdy suit and an extraordinarily unbecoming hat that has her peering through a black veil the entire time. The reshot sequence substitutes a more stylish suit and a simple black beret, which not only improves her appearance tremendously, but also gives her a jaunty air that complements Epstein's bantering dialogue. In the new version of the office scene, Bacall, angry at Bogart, picks up the phone and calls the police, whereupon Bogart snatches the phone away from her and uses double talk to confuse the desk sergeant who answered. Bacall snatches the phone back, but instead of going through with the call she immediately joins Bogart in a memorable double-talk routine performed at the lightning pace of one of Hawks's screwball comedies. Apart from the erotic current running through it—it's like a form of sublimated sex—the routine wouldn't seem out of place in a Marx Brothers or Abbot and Costello picture, and Bogart and Bacall perform it with complete aplomb. With their precision timing and instinctive responsiveness to each other, they're like a pair of vaudeville partners who've been working together for years. It's one of the high points of the movie.

The pre-release version of the office scene

The release version of the office scene

When the auteurist film critics of the 1950s and 1960s first began discussing the idea that certain directors leave their personal mark on their work so distinctly that they can be considered the "author" of their films, one of the directors most often cited as an example was Howard Hawks. The Big Sleep makes it easy to see why, for it's a wonderful showcase for Hawks's strengths as a director. Above all, this means his prowess at telling a story visually without becoming intrusive. Hawks was a master of narrative momentum, and everything he does in The Big Sleep—staging, framing, camera placement and movement, editing, the image that moves the story forward, the conversation that defines character and relationship—is calculated to sustain that momentum.

Dialogue this good really shows how impressive is Hawks's way of staging conversations. He rarely relies on the tedious back-and-forth of over-the-shoulder shots during long passages of conversation, but instead consistently finds imaginative and kinetic ways of visualizing these. Hawks also has a way of using the pace and rhythm of his actors' line readings to bring out the nuances of the dialogue. He has a wonderful sense of the simultaneous seriousness and absurdity of many of the situations in the film as well, a trait that makes him seem quite modern in comparison to most studio directors of the time. Hawks's use of setting to create ambience also comes through strongly in the film. The sweltering orchid house at the Sternwood mansion; Bacall's huge, overdecorated white-on-white bedroom; the blackmailer's Oriental-fantasy cottage in the Hollywood Hills; the slick, country club-like gambling den where Bacall plays roulette—all these places are conceived and used for the maximum atmospheric effect.

Yet for all its other strengths, it's doubtful that The Big Sleep would be remembered as well as it is today without the star power of Bogart and Bacall. After the impact they made on the moviegoing public in To Have and Have Not, Warners certainly realized the audience appeal of the pair, who by the time of the reshoots in early 1946 were fully involved in a well-publicized personal relationship.  "THEY'RE TOGETHER AGAIN! THAT MAN—BOGART! AND THAT WOMAN BACALL!" proclaimed the trailer for The Big Sleep. Over the years there have been many legendary screen teams, but Bogart and Bacall, who made only four films together, had more going for them than the onscreen chemistry that makes an enduring star team: No other legendary screen pair ever had this amount of unmistakably erotic electricity.

The Big Sleep is an example of the best thing that could happen in studio films of the Golden Age—that harmonious confluence of elements that results in a great movie: Hawks's cynicism and Chandler's. The stylized, double entendre-laced dialogue of Chandler, Faulkner et al. and Hawks's ability to wring the most from dialogue. Hawks's knack for assembling a cast that makes even the most minor character memorable. Above all, the blazing, larger-than-life charisma of Bogart and Bacall. As for the convoluted plot, it's probably best not to dwell on it. After all, not many film noirs can withstand scrutiny for loose threads in the narrative, consistency of character behavior, or believability of character motivation. Their appeal lies elsewhere—in their dark view of the world, their compellingly flawed antiheroes and femmes fatales, and their Expressionist-influenced visual style. Pauline Kael probably summed up The Big Sleep as well as anyone when she wrote that "it's the dialogue and the entertaining qualities of the individual sequences that make this movie." So sit back, forget plot logic, and savor one of the most purely enjoyable films of the 1940s.

This post is part of the Classic Movie Blog Association's Fabulous Films of the 1940s Blogathon, which runs Feb. 17-22. Click here for more information about the blogathon and a full schedule.

3 Discovering Carole Lombard

During October 2008 Turner Classic Movies paid tribute to Carole Lombard as its Star of the Month, giving me the chance to learn more about this actress. One of the major stars of the early Hollywood studio period, Lombard is an actress who has a devoted following. There is even a film/fan site (Carol & Co.) that publishes almost daily articles about her. But before the TCM tribute I had seen her in only a couple of films, both of them well-known screwball comedies from the 1930s, one of my pet genres. Having now seen several more of her films from the late thirties and early forties (she died in a plane crash in 1942 at the age of 33), I can understand why she has inspired such devotion among her fans. She will not supplant my absolute personal favorites of the early studio era—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, and Irene Dunne—but she will now be one of my also-greats, joining the likes of Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, Greta Garbo, and Margaret Sullavan—not bad company to be in.

Carole Lombard appeared in her first movie in 1921 at the age of thirteen. She had appeared in around 60 films before she got the lead in the movie that made her a star: Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century (1934). This was the year screwball comedy was born in Hollywood with It Happened One Night, setting off a craze for the genre that lasted nearly ten years. (According to the website notstarring.com, Lombard turned down the lead in It Happened One Night.) Twentieth Century was the other notable example of screwball comedy from that year and exhibits the take on the genre that Hawks would continue with his masterpieces Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). It's all there in Hawks's very first attempt at the new genre—the frenetic pacing, rapid-fire dialogue, contrived but hilarious situations, put-upon supporting characters, and egotistical lead characters.

Twentieth Century was just about the last remaining classic screwball comedy I had never seen, and what a treat it was to see it at last. The movie has now joined my list of the top examples of the genre. John Barrymore, lampooning his own image, stars as Oscar Jaffe, a flamboyant, manipulative, often hysterical Broadway director given to melodramatic pronouncements like "The iron door slams!" and "Anathema! Child of Satan!" at moments of heightened emotionalism. Lombard plays his new discovery, a shopgirl named Mildred Plotka whom Jaffe wants to rename Lily Garland and transform into a star. Only Jaffe has any faith in the newcomer's ability, and at this point the screenplay requires that Lombard be weepy, immature, and so insecure that she is ready to give up the idea of acting and return to the sales counter. But with patience, encouragement, and gentle cajoling, Jaffe does succeed into molding her into a star.

Three years later Lily is the most esteemed actress on the New York stage, and Jaffe, like a true Svengali, is now romantically involved with her. But he has become so possessive, controlling, and jealous that Lily can no longer stand him. Now Lombard must play her character in a completely different mode—successful, confident, mature, independent, and rebellious. She walks out on Jaffe ("That's not love," she says of their relationship. "It's sheer tyranny. I'm no Trilby.") and heads for Hollywood.

The plot now shifts ahead even further. Lily is a hugely successful movie star, and Oscar is close to financial ruin, not having had one successful production since Lily left him. By chance he finds himself on the same train as Lily, the Twentieth Century Limited, traveling from Chicago to New York. Convinced that his career will be saved if he can just get her to star in his next production, he determines to get her to agree to do so before the train reaches its destination. The dirty tricks campaign he embarks on (not dissimilar to Cary Grant's efforts to stop his ex-wife from remarrying in His Girl Friday) and the complications that follow occupy the bulk of the movie.

The rub, though, is that Lily, having achieved Hollywood stardom, has become as much of a temperamental egomaniac as her former mentor, and Lombard is now required to portray Lily as a swollen-headed, self-centered shrew. Reportedly, Lombard was so intimidated by working with Barrymore, who at the time was still at the height of his profession, that Hawks had to take her aside and threaten to replace her if she didn't loosen up and stop holding back in her scenes with him. Whatever Hawks did, it must have worked, for Lombard easily holds her own with Barrymore for the rest of the movie and gives as good as she gets. It was no surprise that Barrymore was up to the demands of his role. The surprise is how well Lombard, pretty much untried in this type of exaggerated, broad comedy, does with her role, which unlike Barrymore's requires her to act convincingly in three different modes—first insecure, then independent, and finally insufferable.

If Twentieth Century clearly showed how good Lombard was at broad comedy, it only hinted at her remarkable range as an actress. It took a whole series of movies to do this. In My Man Godfrey (1936), another classic screwball comedy, Lombard plays Irene Bullock, one of those proverbial madcap heiresses. But her performance is much less theatrical than in Twentieth Century, and her sweet-natured, guileless naiveté is utterly charming. Her speech is fast and breathless, rather like Katharine Hepburn's in Bringing Up Baby. Like Hepburn in that movie, Lombard's character is impulsive and mercurial, and she shows the same child-like resolve to get her man. This performance earned Lombard her only Oscar nomination.

The next year Lombard made another classic screwball comedy, Nothing Sacred. She plays Hazel Flagg, a young woman who has been mistakenly diagnosed with radium poisoning and is turned into an overnight media celebrity by a cynical reporter played by Fredric March. This is a movie loved by many, but—prepare yourselves for sacrilege—it is one that I have never totally warmed to, even after repeated viewings. For some reason the movie just doesn't click for me the way my favorite screwball comedies do. Despite mixed feelings about the film, I still find the lead performances outstanding, particularly Lombard's, in which she shows a flair for unpretentious physical comedy that pokes fun at her glamor and her astounding beauty. Many consider this her signature performance, and for anyone interested in her career it is essential viewing.

Lombard's work in two lesser-known movies is further evidence of her versatility. In 1935 she made a little comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen called Hands Across the Table, in which she plays a manicurist in a swanky New York hotel whose one goal is to marry a rich man. She sets her sights on rich paraplegic Ralph Bellamy but finds herself falling in love with Fred MacMurray, whom she believes to be penniless. (Of course, he isn't.) It sounds like a classic screwball comedy situation, but the movie lacks the antic quality typical of the genre. Lombard comes across as quite level-headed and practical and maybe just a bit disappointed with life. In the end she chooses MacMurray not just because of love, but also because she is simply too nice to exploit Bellamy in such a mercenary way. Lombard creates a quietly touching and intelligent character who is quite distinct from her boisterous Lily in Twentieth Century, her energetic Hazel in Nothing Sacred, or her whimsical Irene in My Man Godfrey.

Lombard turns in another impressive performance that showcases her ability to integrate the light with the serious in In Name Only (1939). In this film she plays a widow and mother who rents a house for the summer from Cary Grant. Grant is unhappily married to Kay Francis, who he has discovered married him solely for his money. Grant and Lombard are immediately attracted to one another and quickly fall in love. The problem is Grant's possessive wife, who refuses to give him a divorce. The movie is a showcase for the range of both Lombard and Grant, who seem to have tremendous chemistry. They are allowed to behave at times in a relaxed, loving, and light-hearted manner with each other—the considerable charm of both actors at full throttle—and at other times in a serious and troubled manner when various obstacles, including the machinations of Grant's duplicitous wife, keep them apart. The plot is pure soap, but both Lombard and Grant rise above the familiar plot to create characterizations that are completely winning. If there were ever any doubts about Lombard's ability to handle serious roles, her performance in In Name Only surely put them to rest.

In two of her last movies Lombard returned to the comedy genre she was so associated with. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) is a screwball-type comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his only effort at a purely comic picture. The movie, while enjoyable, lacks both Hitchcock's distinctive touches and the sparkle typical of the genre. Lombard is the best thing in the movie, and the presence of her by-now distinctive personality is alone sufficient reason to watch it.

The most remarkable thing about the movie is how closely Lombard conforms to Hitchcock's idealized image of blonde beauty as personified by his other leading women like Madeleine Carroll, Grace Kelly, and Eva Marie Saint. Lombard was a very beautiful woman, but she never looked lovelier than in this picture. She is photographed by the great Harry Stradling in ways that deliberately emphasize her stunning facial beauty. Time and again, as she was photographed in close-up, with her full lips, prominent cheekbones, and straight, rather long nose, I was reminded of Greta Garbo. Like Garbo, Lombard's face seems mask-like, sculpturesque, and ethereal—an archetypal image of timeless female beauty. Garbo's favorite cinematographer, William Daniels, once remarked that Garbo "had no bad angles." The same could be said of Carole Lombard in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and to adore that exquisite face is reason enough to see this movie.

Carole Lombard's last picture, To Be or Not to Be (1942), improbably manages to combine topical anti-Nazism with pointed comedy. Released the year after her death, it was directed by Ernst Lubitsch. In Lombard's entire screen career, she was probably never paired with a director whose light comedic touch was so attuned to her own comedic skills, and in this film she gives what to me is her most enchanting performance. As the beautiful leading lady of a Polish theater troupe that finds itself engaged in a battle of wits with Nazis to help the Polish Resistance and to effect its own escape to Britain, she is married to its egotistical leading man, played by Jack Benny.

Lombard's restrained performance forms quite a contrast to Benny's intentionally hammy one; she is at times required almost to play the "straight man" to her costar. Benny's outrageous antics propel the complicated ruse the troupe concocts to dupe the Nazis, while the beautiful Lombard handles the romantic distractions involved in the ruse. She never falters in the face of Benny's purposeful overacting but delivers an understated portrait of a woman who possesses great shrewdness, poise, and dignity beneath her glamorous exterior. The Lubitsch touch and the Lombard touch turn out to be a perfect match, and the film stands as an appropriate valedictory tribute to her beauty, grace, charm, and ability to seamlessly blend seriousness with humor.

By all accounts the real Carole Lombard was an unpretentious, generous, lively person with an outsized sense of humor. In one way or another those qualities all come through in her movie characters. Add to those qualities her great acting talent and her gorgeous looks, and you have a working definition of what is referred to as Star Quality.

1 Bringing Up Baby: The Funniest Screwball Comedy

Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and Howard Hawks. A dog, a leopard, and a dinosaur bone. Charlie Ruggles, May Robson, and Barry Fitzgerald. Some of the most hilarious visual and verbal comedy ever put on film. These are the main ingredients of the funniest example of screwball comedy ever made: Bringing Up Baby (1938).

I've written previously of the classic elements of screwball comedy ("An Unsuitable Attachment: The Classic American Screwball Comedy"), and Bringing Up Baby fulfills the definition of the genre in every respect. Cary Grant plays David Huxley, a paleontologist engaged to be married the next day to his assistant Alice Swallow, an unromantic, bossy, and humorless woman ("I see our marriage purely as a dedication to your work," she tells him at the beginning of the movie). David himself is only slightly less rigid and conventional than his fiancée. He is a dedicated careerist who seems less excited by the prospect of his imminent marriage than by the news that the last missing bone of the brontosaurus skeleton he is erecting has been discovered and will arrive shortly.

But first he must meet and play golf with the lawyer who represents a potential benefactor, Elizabeth Random (May Robson), a rich woman who is considering donating one million dollars to David's museum. It is at the golf course that he has his first unfortunate encounter with a scatter-brained and impetuous heiress named Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a character for whom the term "madcap" might have been invented. She appropriates his golf ball and his car and wrecks both the car and, at least temporarily, David's chances of getting the donation. Unknown to David, Susan happens to be the niece of Mrs. Random, so it is inevitable that their paths will cross again . . . and again . . . and again. In fact, once he meets her a second time that evening in a night club, where he has gone (carrying with him the box containing his precious dinosaur bone) to meet the lawyer and try to salvage his chances for the donation, he is trapped with her in a hellish and hilarious relationship that lasts for the rest of the movie, a relationship that involves him not only with Susan but with her aunt, her fox terrier George, a pet leopard named Baby, and other assorted eccentric characters including a tipsy gardener (Barry Fitzgerald), a befuddled big-game hunter (Charles Ruggles), a self-important psychiatrist, and an officious small-town sheriff.

In truth, this impromptu relationship is the result of Susan's almost instant decision that she is in love with David and that to get him she will do anything to prevent him from making it to his wedding the next day. (I said she was impetuous, didn't I?) As in many screwball comedies of the 1930's and early 1940's, the man is the reluctant object of romantic desire, and the woman is the single-minded pursuer. In Bringing Up Baby it is inarguable that Susan's determination to snare David is the initial force that sets in motion the machinery of the plot. And the plot of Bringing Up Baby is indeed a complex and finely tuned machine that, once started, hurtles forward at breakneck speed and propels the viewer to everything else that happens in the movie.

What I refer to as everything else is so complicated that it is impossible to summarize briefly. As in the best silent comedies, from a prime situation—here the random encounter at the golf course—the narrative builds in a headlong, unpredictable, and intricate way that defies synopsis or even concise description. Just when you think the inventory of comic conventions has been exhausted, that every conceivable comic complication has been laid on, Hawks piles on yet another one. The film is virtually an encyclopedia of movie comedy. It contains everything: pratfalls—on a slippery Martini olive, into poison ivy, down a hillside, into a river, even from the scaffolding of David's brontosaurus skeleton—verbal miscommunication and talking at cross-purposes, mistaken identity, impersonation, comic deception, even a doppelganger in the form of a second (but feral) leopard. Everything in the movie becomes fodder for comedy: clothing, automobiles, golf, gangsters, circuses, academia, psychiatry, law enforcement. Nothing is too serious or too sacred to be spared Hawks's acerbic, limitlessly inventive imagination. The pace is relentless, leaving the viewer not only breathless but overcome with laughter.

Bringing Up Baby is quite simply the funniest movie I have ever seen. The two long sequences in which David and Susan follow George the dog, trying to find where he buried that crucial dinosaur bone, and in which David and Susan try to capture the escaped leopard using a croquet mallet and a fish-landing net are deliriously funny. And when virtually the entire cast, including the leopard, converges on the local jail and Susan pretends to be the hard-boiled leader of a gang of bank robbers, the movie has so far departed from any semblance of reality, logic, and normal human behavior that it seems to inhabit a universe of its own, not unlike one of the more outlandish Marx Brothers movies or plays of Oscar Wilde: silliness so sublime that it is elevated to art.

You might think that with all these mad plot complications, and with all this hilarious physical and verbal comedy going on, the characters would take a back seat. Yet that is not the case, for the characters of Susan and David as impersonated by Hepburn and Grant are the glue that holds the movie together. They are the force that moves the film from the clever mechanics of comedy to the humanity of an evolving romantic relationship.

In a recent blog ("The Definitive Screwball Comedy") I described how the main characters in another screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, a married couple who separate and then reconcile at the last moment, were ideally suited to each other all along and that their notions of incompatibility are nonsense. In Bringing Up Baby the situation could hardly be more different. In this movie Susan and David are complete opposites and truly seem to be wholly unsuited to each other. Yet it is precisely their opposite temperaments that, paradoxically, make them the ideal match. Susan, like her pet leopard, is untamed, unpredictable, and predatory. (Her pursuit of David might today be referred to as "stalking.") Compared to Susan, David, like his dinosaur, is ossified, without flesh and blood, and lacking animation. She is emotional; he is rational. She is all impulse; he is all control. To put it in Freudian terms, if she is ruled by her id, then he is ruled by his superego. Separately, each is an incomplete personality. Each needs the other to supply the missing parts of his or her temperament, for only together will each become a complete and balanced personality. To accomplish this, Susan has to gain self-control and gravity, and David must learn to loosen his self-control and let himself go.

This is exactly what happens at the end of Bringing Up Baby. Susan applies herself to seriously looking for the missing bone and when she finds it a few days later contritely delivers it to David at the museum. The now subdued Susan tells him that her aunt gave her the million dollars and that she in turn has decided to donate it to the museum herself. And when she apologizes for her behavior, David, who earlier had told her, "Our relationship has been a series of misadventures from beginning to end," finally thaws. "I just discovered that was the best day I had in my whole life," he confesses. "I never had a better time." When the dinosaur skeleton collapses in the last scene and David lifts Susan to the now isolated platform overlooking a pile of dinosaur bones and embraces her, it is more than just another hilarious sight gag. It is the visual evidence that Susan has finally succeeded in her pursuit of David and has now conquered the last remaining rival for his affection—his obsessive devotion to his work.

Regular readers of this blog may well be wondering why, having already named The Awful Truth as the definitive screwball comedy, I am writing about Bringing Up Baby as though that title belonged to it. The truth is that each of these movies is, in its own way, a definitive version of the screwball comedy. But the two films are so different that any consideration of the two movies together results in the proverbial Apples and Oranges situation: yes, they are both fruit, but they are otherwise so unalike that any attempt at comparison would seem impossibly problematic .

One comparison that is possible, though, is that of methods. The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby represent opposite approaches to the same end—the classic screwball comedy dilemma of showing how two people who believe they are unsuited to each other discover that this is not the case at all. The Awful Truth exhibits all the Apollonian virtues. It is controlled, balanced, ordered, and temperate. In contrast Bringing Up Baby exhibits all the characteristics of the Dionysian sensibility. It is spontaneous, chaotic, and anarchic, intoxicated with the passion and excess of its own exuberant absurdism. Each is a perfect exemplar of its chosen approach. The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby—for me these are the twin stars around which the galaxy of screwball comedy orbits.

Apples or oranges? I'll have one of each, please.

0 His Girl Friday: A Distinctively Bitter Screwball Comedy

[Howard] Hawks has stamped his distinctively bitter view of life on adventure, gangster and private-eye melodramas, Westerns, musicals, and screwball comedies.

— Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

After watching Howard Hawks's classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday (1940) with a friend recently, I asked him what he thought of it. He admitted that it was a very funny movie but then confessed that in the end he didn't really like it very much. When I asked him why not, he replied, "Because there weren't any nice people in it." His comment made me realize that the cynical view of human nature pervading Hawks's movies, even his comedies, is something I have come to take for granted. Even in a Hawks comedy it no longer strikes me as incongruous because it is what I expect of any Hawks film.

In His Girl Friday, based on the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Cary Grant plays Walter Johnson, the editor of a New York newspaper. Rosalind Russell plays Hildy Johnson, his ex-wife and star reporter. The play was filmed once before by Lewis Milestone in 1931 under its original title, with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien playing Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson, and has since been remade several times and in many other guises. Hawks's major innovation was to update the source material to the then-fashionable screwball genre by making Hildy a female character and also Walter's ex-wife.

In the very first scene Hildy walks briskly through the crowded, bustling city room and into Walter's office to announce not only her resignation from the newspaper but her engagement to Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), a strait-laced insurance agent from Albany. In typical Hawks fashion, this walk to Walter's office—with its swift pace, lengthy tracking shots as the camera follows Hildy's progress through the city room, abundant visual detail, and non-stop banter between Hildy and the other reporters—sets the tone for the whole movie. The entire sequence is one of continuous movement and sarcastic, rapid-fire dialogue.

As soon as Hildy announces her intention to resign and remarry, Walter immediately begins a campaign to thwart her in both of these intentions. His strategy is to convince her through flattery and chicanery that she is the only person who can possibly cover the story of convicted murderer Earl Williams, scheduled to be executed the next morning unless a last-minute reprieve from the governor comes through. What follows is in many ways an archetypal screwball comedy. Baldwin is a likeable but vapid dunce, and Hildy is clearly making a mistake in her plans to leave behind the excitement of her career and unstable life with Walter for the comfortable, unchallenging boredom of a conventional marriage, "with a house and children," to Baldwin. What really distinguishes His Girl Friday from other screwball comedies of the time, though, is precisely what disturbed my friend about the movie: the cynicism in which Hawks steeps the characters and their behavior.

Hawks's bitter view of humanity—his deep conviction that all human action is essentially motivated by self-interest—is projected onto nearly every character in His Girl Friday. In no character is this more apparent than in Cary Grant's Walter Johnson. His dirty tricks campaign to sabotage Hildy's engagement is relentless. So single-minded is he in pursuing his goal that his actions are wholly unrestrained by what would normally be considered human feeling.

The hapless Bruce Baldwin is the repeated victim of Walter's machinations. Walter intentionally humiliates Baldwin the first time he meets him by marching up to an elderly and unattractive man and pretending to mistake him for Baldwin. The mild-mannered Baldwin meekly sits in the background, unable to get a word in edgewise because of Walter's non-stop effusion in introducing himself to the man he has pretended to mistake for Hildy's fiancé. When Hildy, who seems not at all surprised by Walter's self-centered sense of humor, arrives and sorts out the situation, Walter responds with mock apology, and the credulous Baldwin innocently assumes there has been a true case of mistaken identity, never for a moment suspecting Walter's manipulative ruse. Walter continues to torment Baldwin at every turn (even causing him unjustly to land in jail), and Baldwin continues to believe that the string of merciless humiliations is unintentional. That Hawks manages to obscure the innate unkindness of Walter's repeated victimization of Baldwin by making it seem very, very funny is a testament to Hawks's skill at wresting humor from the most unpromising premise—that even cruelty can be played for laughs.

Even the initially sympathetic Hildy eventually shows her true nature when, as Walter intended, she is hooked by the irresistible lure of the story she has committed herself to write. (She has agreed to do this for purely mercenary reasons, to earn $5,000 so that she and Baldwin can buy a house and not be forced to live with his mother.) She is simply too thoroughly a professional reporter to overcome her natural instinct to pursue to the end, and if necessary embellish, a potential story. In the press room at the prison, she easily holds her own with the other reporters—all male, all aggressively pursuing the same story. But it is when she is finally allowed to conduct an interview with the condemned killer that Hawks fully reveals his cynic's conception of her exploitative personality.

The condemned killer, like Bruce Baldwin another soft-spoken naïf, has no clear conception of why he actually shot his victim; the murder seems to have been more the result of an accident than an intentional act. Yet Hildy, in her "interview" with the laconic killer, cleverly manages to create a story where there is none. This she does by putting words in the befuddled and suggestible man's mouth until she has created a scenario that not only appears to explain his actions but also in large measure exculpates him by making him seem to have been temporarily insane at the time.

The minor characters in the movie also get their share of Hawks's bile. The reporters in the press room are portrayed as vultures. They are, after all, essentially participating in an all-night death watch with the remote possibility that a last-minute reprieve from the governor will arrive before Williams hangs. Either way, they will get their story, and that is all these ultra-competitive scoundrels care about. When Williams's lady friend of one night, another pathetic and lonely individual, arrives and then dramatically throws herself from the window, the reporters all race to the window and stare into the courtyard below, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. "She's dead," one calmly says. "No she ain't. She's movin'," another impassively adds. Then they all race back to the telephones to call in the story.

But Hawks reserves his most vitriolic judgments for the elected officials in the movie, the sheriff and the city mayor, two characters of such unredeemed ambition, greed, and corruption that they make the politicians, lawyers, and bankers in the typical Frank Capra movie seem almost innocuous in comparison. When a messenger from the governor does indeed arrive with a reprieve, the mayor, desperately needing to be perceived as a law-and-order crime fighter before facing an election the next week, bribes the messenger and persuades him to take the retrieve back and pretend he arrived too late to prevent the hanging. The sheriff, his crony, abets him in this scheme.

In the end, after many more complications, Williams is saved from execution and declared to have been temporarily insane at the time of the shooting, and the corrupt sheriff and mayor are exposed. Baldwin returns to Albany without Hildy, and Hildy returns to both Walter and the newspaper. Despite, and in some measure because of, the fallibility of human nature, order has been restored and justice has prevailed—at least for a little while, for in Hawks's world human nature may be constant, but everything else is in perpetual motion.

---

It is widely known that although Cary Grant, who had worked with Hawks before, was cast early as Walter Johnson, virtually every major comic actress in Hollywood turned down the role of Hildy (including, according to notstarring.com, Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, and Ginger Rogers) before the part was offered to Rosalind Russell. I have also read that after viewing the first dailies, Hawks and his stars all realized that something wasn't working. At a loss to identify what was wrong, Hawks suggested that the actors speed up the dialogue, firing it off at about half again the speed they had been using. After seeing the results, all agreed that the problem was fixed.