Happy New Year! I hope you had a great night last night and are looking forward to your best year yet! I have a great feeling about 2016 and pray it’s a happy, healthy one for you all. Today I’m cleaning up the holiday decor, putting everything away, and catching a little of a classic film, when I have a chance to sit. Today’s flick? The Big Sleep. If you haven’t seen The Big Sleep, you need to have a movie day immediately. It’s one of AMC’s Greatest 100 Movies of All Time and stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Here’s some fun trivia to get you intrigued. Let me know how you like it!
–Raymond Chandler claimed that Martha Vickers gave such an intense performance as Carmen Sternwood that she completely overshadowed Lauren Bacall, and that much of Vickers’ performance ended up on the cutting room floor as a result.
–Due to Humphrey Bogart’s affair with co-star Lauren Bacall, his marital problems escalated during filming, and his drinking often resulted in his being unable to work. Three months after the film was finished, Bacall and Bogart were married.
–The scene where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall make suggestive talk about horses was added almost a year after filming was otherwise complete, in an attempt to inject the film with the kind of risqué innuendos that had made To Have and Have Not (1944), and Bacall, so popular a few years earlier.
–Warner Bros. studio chief Jack L. Warner gave Howard Hawks $50,000 to purchase the rights for “The Big Sleep.” Hawks bought the rights for $5,000 and pocketed the rest. According to film historian Jon Tuska the purchase price was actually $10,000.
–Rumors that Andy Williams dubbed Lauren Bacall’s singing voice are untrue. Both director Howard Hawks and Bacall confirm that she did her own singing.The same rumors persist regarding her singing voice in To Have and Have Not, and are equally untrue.
–The fussy persona that Marlowe adopts upon arriving in Geiger’s bookstore has been a subject of argument for years; Lauren Bacall said that Humphrey Bogart came up with it while Howard Hawks claimed in interviews that it was his idea. What both of them failed to notice is that it was in the original book (“I had my horn-rimmed glasses on. I put my voice high and let a bird twitter in it.”); all Bogart did was elaborate on it.
–Many of the cars in the film have a “B” sticker in the lower-right corner of their windshields. This is a reflection of the wartime rationing of gasoline. Gas was rationed primarily to save rubber, because Japan had occupied Indochina, Malaysia, and Indonesia. (There was a shortage of gas on the East Coast until a pipeline from Texas was constructed to replace the transport of crude oil by sea.) The B sticker was the second lowest category, entitling the holder to only 8 gallons of gas a week. Marlowe seems to use more than one week’s allotment during a 72-hour period, which may be intended to reflect a black market in ration books. However, since Marlowe still has a deputy badge, at least in a deleted scene which existed in the 1945 version, he would be entitled to an X sticker (unlimited gas) as a peace officer. Perhaps the B sticker on the windshield was camouflage, since an X sticker would make the car extremely noteworthy. Marlowe also refers to “three red points,” and speaks of a dead body as “cold meat” which refers to the red tokens used to acquire a family’s allotment of meat during WWII.
–The second of four films made by real life couple and later husband and wife Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. This film follows Bacall’s debut in To Have and Have Not (1944), during which their romance was first kindled on set. Following this film, the couple teamed up twice more, for Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948).
–According to Lauren Bacall, production was such fun, that they got a memo from Jack L. Warner saying “Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop.””
–Humphrey Bogart’s indecision over whether or not to leave his wife triggered a bout of nerves for Lauren Bacall, whose hands shook whenever she had to light a cigarette or pour a drink during the filming.
–Howard Hawks did not approve of the Bogart-Bacall relationship. He had discovered Lauren Bacall, still had her under a personal contract, and felt rather paternal toward her. In addition to lecturing her about staying away from her co-star, Hawks and his wife tried to fix her up with other men, including Clark Gable.
–Dorothy Malone was just starting out in movies when she played the bookstore clerk. She was so nervous making the scene they had to weight the glass of liquor she offers him to keep her hands from shaking.
–Warner Bros. executives were so impressed with Lauren Bacall’s work and the success of her previously released To Have and Have Not (1944) that they renegotiated her contract, raising her salary from $350 a week to $1,000.
–On the first day of shooting Bogart allegedly had five or six drinks at lunch, which infuriated director Howard Hawks, who berated Bogart for his unprofessionalism. After that he was limited to one beer.
–Howard Hawks and the writers tried various endings for the story. In one, Carmen attempts to fake a suicide only to discover that her gun is loaded with real bullets rather than blanks. Next, they had Carmen confess to her crimes and walk into an ambush by gangsters. Finally, they wrote it so that Marlowe decided, on the basis of a coin toss, to allow her to leave the house and walk into the ambush. When the Production Code committee objected to the violence, Hawks asked how they would end the film, and they came up with the idea of Marlowe forcing the gangster chief out of the house, where the criminal was shot by his own gang. Hawks was so impressed he offered to hire them as writers.
All film trivia courtesy of IMDB
Julie Ann Smith says
Omg I just love your blog it is so inspirational and I look forward to seeing future posts from you!