1.10.2007

New Statesman- To Have and Have Not

Article on relationships between actors in and from films. Actually pretty good and not just Hollywood gossip:

From Bogart and Bacall to Brad and Angelina, Hollywood relationships have always reflected the romantic values to which we aspire

You must remember this. Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is looking tattered and torn, but pleased with himself all the same. He has solved the mystery, sent the bad guys packing and told the cops all they need to know in order to look like they've been on the case. "You've forgotten one thing," says Vivian Sternwood (played by Lauren Bacall) - "me." "What's wrong with you?" asks Marlowe. Vivian moves toward him: "Nothing you can't fix." And the credits roll - over a close-up of two cigarettes in an ashtray, their coils of smoke entwining.

What kind of picture is The Big Sleep (1946)? The Raymond Chandler novel on which it is based is a winding and weighty detective thriller. But Howard Hawks's film, which follows Chandler's story pretty closely, is an altogether sunnier number, a lighter-than-air romantic comedy ballasted by the odd thud of a sap, the occasional crackle of gunfire. So it's rather like To Have and Have Not (1944), which took what Hawks called a "piece of junk" by Hemingway and twisted its sententious disquisition on the nature of masculinity into a war-torn bedroom farce: Noël Coward meets the Nazis.

The meeting that really counted in that picture, however, was the one between its two leads, Bogart and Bacall making their debut together. It was fascinating enough that these two really did fall for one another while making the film. Better still that, in doing so, they created a new kind of cinema couple - one that refused to grant Hollywood's conception of romance its customary restrictions. When Bogart's Harry Morgan makes Bacall's "Slim" walk right round him to prove he has no strings attached, he does so to woo her with a vision of love that acknowledges no ties.

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