What you sense here is the enjoyable sight of two people who are in love and enjoy toying with each other. The new scenes add a charge to the film that was missing in the 1945 version; this is a case where “studio interference” was exactly the right thing. The only reason to see the earlier version is to go behind the scenes, to learn how the tone and impact of a movie can be altered with just a few scenes. (The accompanying documentary even shows how dialogue was redubbed to get a slightly different spin.)
As for the 1946 version that we have been watching all of these years, it is one of the great film noirs, a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler’s ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares. Working from Chandler’s original words and adding spins of their own, the writers (William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett) wrote one of the most quotable of screenplays: It’s unusual to find yourself laughing in a movie not because something is funny but because it’s so wickedly clever. (Marlowe on the “nymphy” kid sister: “She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.”) Unlike modern crime movies which are loaded with action, The Big Sleep is heavy with dialogue—the characters talk and talk, just like in the Chandler novels; it’s as if there’s a competition to see who has the most verbal style.
Martha Vickers was indeed electric as the kid sister, and Dorothy Malone all but steals her scene as a book clerk who finds Marlowe intriguing. But the 1945 version makes it clear Bacall was by no means as bad as Feldman feared she was: She is adequate in most scenes, and splendid in others—but the scenes themselves didn’t give her the opportunities that the reshoot did. In scenes like the “racing” conversation she has the dry reserve, the private amusement, the way of sizing up a man and enjoying the competition, that became her trademark. It’s astonishing to realize she was twenty, untrained as an actor, and by her own report scared to death.
Bogart himself made personal style into an art form. What else did he have? He wasn’t particularly handsome, he wore a rug, he wasn’t tall (“I try to be,” he tells Vickers), and he always seemed to act within a certain range. Yet no other movie actor is more likely to be remembered a century from now. And the fascinating subtext in The Big Sleep is that in Bacall he found his match.
You can see it in his eyes: Sure, he’s in love, but there’s something else, too. He was going through a messy breakup with his wife, Mayo, when they shot the picture. He was drinking so heavily he didn’t turn up some days, and Hawks had to shoot around him. He saw this coltish twenty-year-old not only as his love but perhaps as his salvation. That’s the undercurrent. It may not have been fun to live through, but it creates a kind of joyous, desperate tension on the screen. And since the whole idea of film noir was to live through unspeakable experiences and keep your cool, this was the right screenplay for this time in his life.
Howard Hawks (1896–1977) is one of the great American directors of pure movies (His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, Red River, Rio Bravo), and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in many different kinds of genre material. He once defined a good movie as “three great scenes and no bad scenes.” Comparing the two versions of The Big Sleep reveals that the reshoots inserted one of the great scenes, and removed some of the bad ones, neatly proving his point.
Blood Simple (15th Anniversary)
R, 97 m., 2000
John Getz (Ray), Frances McDormand (Abby), Dan Hedaya (Julian Marty), M. Emmet Walsh (Private Detective Loren Visser), Samm-Art Williams (Meurice). Directed by Joel Coen and produced by Ethan Coen. Screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.
The genius of Blood Simple is that everything that happens seems necessary. The movie’s a blood-soaked nightmare in which greed and lust trap the characters in escalating horror. The plot twists in upon itself. Characters are found in situations of diabolical complexity. And yet it doesn’t feel like the film is just piling it on. Step by inexorable step, logically, one damned thing leads to another.
Consider the famous sequence in which a man is in one room and his hand is nailed to the windowsill in another room. How he got into that predicament, and how he tries to get out of it, all makes perfect sense when you see the film. But if you got an assignment in a film class that began with a close-up of that hand snaking in through the window and being nailed down, how easy would it be to write the setup scenes? This was the first film directed by Joel Coen, produced by his brother Ethan, and cowritten by the two. Their joint credits have since become famous, with titles such as Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and the incomparable Fargo. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail, but they always swing for the fences, and they are masters of plot. As I wrote in my original 1985 review of Blood Simple: “Every individual detail seems to make sense, and every individual choice seems logical, but the choices and details form a bewildering labyrinth.” They build crazy walls with sensible bricks.
What we have here is the fifteenth anniversary “director’s cut” of Blood Simple, restored and rereleased. Its power remains undiminished: It is one of the best of the modern film noirs, a grimy story of sleazy people trapped in a net of betrayal and double-cross. When the Coens use clichés such as the Corpse That Will Not Die, they raise it to a whole new level of usefulness. They are usually original, but when they borrow a movie convention, they rotate it so that the light shines through in an unexpected way.
How exactly is this a “director’s cut”? It runs 97 minutes. The original film had the same running time. The term “director’s cut” often means the director has at last been able to restore scenes that the studio or the MPAA made him take out. The Coens have kept all the original scenes in Blood Simple, and performed a little nip and tuck operation, tightening shots of dialogue they think outstayed their usefulness. It is a subtle operation; you will not notice much different from the earlier cut. The two running times are the same, I deduce, because the brothers have added a tongue-in-cheek preface in which a film restoration expert introduces the new version and claims that it takes advantage of technological breakthroughs made possible since the original came out in 1985.
Blood Simple was made on a limited budget, but like most good films seems to have had all the money it really needed. It is particularly blessed in its central performances. Dan Hedaya plays the unkempt owner of a scummy saloon, who hires a private eye to kill his wife and her lover. The wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with one of the bartenders (John Getz). The detective is played by that poet of sleaze, M. Emmet Walsh. He takes the bar owner’s money and then kills the bar owner. Neat. If he killed the wife, he reasons, he’d still have to kill the bar owner to eliminate a witness against him. This way, he gets the same amount of money for one killing, not two.
Oh, but it gets much more complicated than that. At any given moment in the movie there seems to be one more corpse than necessary, one person who is alive and should be dead, and one person who is completely clueless about both the living and the dead. There is no psychology in the film. Every act is inspired more or less directly by the act that went before, and the motive is always the same: self-preservation, based on guilt and paranoia.
Blood Simple is comic in its dark way, and obviously wants to go over the top. But it doesn’t call attention to its contrivance. It is easy to do a parody of film noir, but hard to do good film noir, and almost impossible to make a film that works as suspense and exaggeration at the same time. Blood Simple is clever in the way it makes its incredulities seem necessary.