Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 51

Bogart, Bacall, and Howard Hawks

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added scenes of Bacall.” Warners’ now owned Bacall’s contract and wanted to
maximize their investment in developing her star potential. In fact, so “insolent
and provocative” was Bacall’s dialogue that a year after the film had already received
a PC A seal, Breen’s January 25, 1946 letter to Warner nixed Bacall’s salacious
comeback: “A lot depends on who’s in the saddle.” Yet, the suggestive line remained
in the film.”
The B ig Sleep" ^ final cost was $ 1,562,000; twenty months after the end of
principal photography, its delayed August 1946 release brought in $3,493,000 in
domestic grosses and $1,346,000 internationally, totaling $4,839,000.” Publicity
called Bogart a “two-fisted, realistic private detective Philip Marlowe” in Warners’
effort to reinstitute a gangster narrative via a ''bigshot racketeer and gambler,”
citing “real life” gangsters: “The dashboard gunflap in Detective Bogart’s car was
modeled after a similar utility arsenal that G-men found rigged up in the getaway
car used by ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd Hamilton.” The press book noted "'Big Sleep Aided
Okinawa Storm Victims,” and “Realism Plays Big Role in Filming The B ig Sleep""
as “Rehearsal Realism Assures Solitude.” Red meat is also abundant in Bogart’s
“tough private dick” leaving a “memorable study in black and blue” roughing up
female co-star Vickers. Warner promoted the new female faces amid “sudden death”
in Bogart’s film: “six other girls” and “husky-voiced Bacall.”” Warner Bros.’
publicity even noted a growing trend in Hollywood, citing Raymond Chandler’s
involvement in screen crime adaptations (e.g.. D ouble Indemnity, et al.), increasing
interest in the hard-boiled writer’s tough fiction as source material (e.g.. The B ig
Sleep, et al.), and Hollywood’s “increasing use o f ’ filming “its own California
backyard,” noting D ouble Indemnity and M ildred Pierce. Actually, these films
primarily used enclosed tarped studio backlots rather than “backyard” locations
during the war. The B ig Sleep was called a “violent smoky cocktail” where a “sullen
atmosphere of sex saturates the film.””
Hawks’ successful pairing of Bogart and Bacall in his adaptation of
Hemingway’s To H ave and H ave N ot and Chandler’s The Big Sleep at wartime
Warner Bros, was indicative of a broader Hollywood trend. By August 8, 1945, in
“Crime Certainly Pays on the Screen: The growing crop of homicidal films poses
questions for psychologists and producers,” industry analyst Lloyd Shearer of The
N ew York Times noted the heightened sex and violence of a definitive meaty crime
trend emerging—and gaining momentum—during the war in adopting non-warrelated narrative strategies anticipating a postwar economy, industry, culture and
audience. As primary 1940s industry trade papers suggest:
O f late there has been a trend in Hollywood toward the
wholesale production of lusty, hard-boiled, gat-and-gore crime
stories, all fashioned on a theme with a combination of plausibly