the big sleep, or when a classic's a classic, it's classic!

The Big Sleep: black and white starring...let's go with regis toomey as chief inspector bernie ohls

i think i could watch howard hawks' direction of paint drying. that dude kicks frank capra's ass out the door, as far as i am concerned. it happened one night? come on, what is there to write home about in that? clark gable's trumpet solo? hawks is the man for my money. i mean, capra comes up with these gorgeous shots that, ironically enough, end up with the same kind of aesthetic as '30's russian propaganda posters. cinematographic might makes right. the beauty of mr. deeds goes to washington is, for me, implicated by the judgmental, pixillated values of its storyline: the pictures so lushly captured by the film take on the same shape as its morals, become corrupted by their own desperate simplicity.

with hawks, you don't need to worry about anything being too simple. there's always a lot going on, and if one doesn't condone all of it (not that one has to, per se), it's okay, because there are so many other things that one can watch going on instead. for instance, i'm not too sure about all these random "sweethearts" and "dolls" that make philip marlowe so obviously the man of the hour...but i can let that go, because there was a lot of awesome crowding in around what i found objectionable.

i liked--fairly well--that it stuck pretty close to the book. there were more african americans, gay people, and nudes in the book, but, yeah, what can one expect? my main problem and yet delight was the bacall/bogart relationship, because it's what one wants from the book and does not get...but at the same time the book gives one something--well, okay, here's the final paragraph from the book:

"On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they made me do was think of Silver-Wig [that's Eddie Mars' wife], and I never saw her again."

this, after one of chandler's bizarre, tight, lush diatribes about death, is pretty much genius. It clings to the brain; it captures, you know, something (not sure quite what--some emotional state of loss and hard dreaming, maybe) exactly. it's like, in making the good parts version of the big sleep, the screenwriters lost the great parts version, which is the book. but on the other hand, i see what they were doing, because you can't just deny a '40's audience its bogey and bacall ending. you have to make allowances for the medium and for expectations. i guess '40's cinema is kind of like ours today--everything gets candy-coated because the consumer is king, or something like that. i mean, the big sleep has a big old edge to it--it's downright wicked within parameters (bacall singing "and her tears flowed like wine," the whole horse racing metaphor), but, as with movies today, there are certain things that just can't be depicted, can't be questioned. in the movie. the book is a slightly different story (one which leaves me questioning, among other things, raymond chandler's sexuality...but that's yet another story), but it was intended for a different audience (i think). chandler could write for pulp readers; hollywood couldn't produce movies for pulp watchers. or that's how it feels.

the above is a small sampling of my to-be famous "history by intuition." irving stone, i am not.

anyway, it's interesting to think about. all the acting is awesome, and the movie moves itself along. and the soundtrack is so cool. all those lush, almost formulaic developments, and the quasi-quixotic details...it's neat. it's keen.

yes. i've weighed in on the big sleep. because it was obvious that there needed to be yet another opinion on this classic available to the internet-having public. no need to thank me, america.