Warner bros, p.16
Warner Bros, page 16
Still, it is a film taken from Chandler’s 1939 novel in which a private detective makes gestures towards solving “a case.” Several people are stylishly killed—the death of Harry Jones (Elisha Cook) is still one of the best murders on screen. You can call it a film noir because of those events, the detective and his doll, and the low-key allure of the lighting. But you can as easily label it a screwball comedy because its life and rhythm are in a couple talking at cross purposes or like lovers doodling while they’re doing sex talk on the phone. It does not matter whether Bogart and Bacall were happy together in life (I hope they had their moments), because they have 114 minutes of splendor in this film.
It should go on forever. The idea that the mystery needs to be settled is specious. The external reality of Los Angeles is a joke because the film dwells on and worships its sets, even if one sometimes claims to be a street in the city or a lane in the hills. Who would not listen to General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) reminiscing about his ingeniously wicked daughters? Surely his butler, Norris, has stories we might coax out of him. Don’t we deserve detail from that sourpuss Agnes (Sonia Darrin) on scenarios about the rotten time life gives her? And I have not even come to Dorothy Malone and Martha Vickers yet, treasures who make do with a few sly minutes when they merit hours and days.
It’s not so much that The Big Sleep is an exceptional picture. It’s rather more that an ecstatic state of pure and daft movie has been achieved, and it stretches out like a desert or an ocean. In its entire history, Hollywood got to this prospect only a very few times—a dozen seems generous—and two of those films were made, back to back, at Warner Brothers.
16
After the War, Before the End
AS WAR ENDED, Warner Bros was exuberant. It was pleased to think the crisis was over; it was eager to regain its European market as quickly as possible; and it was excited at the idea of reunited families ready to go to the movies. So it proved: in 1946 and 1947, the studio reported its biggest profits ever—$19 million and $22 million. For a moment it seemed as if Warners could do no wrong. It even rescued Joan Crawford.
Crawford had been all her working life at MGM, as the common woman, the bad girl, the ambitious tramp, who offset the studio’s company of ladies (Garbo, Jeanette MacDonald, Norma Shearer, Greer Garson, Margaret Sullavan).1 She had been there eighteen years and become a national favorite. But her box office was in decline, and the studio was not offering her its best roles. In 1943, never short on courage, Crawford said she would leave, and Metro agreed that her contract should be dropped by mutual consent. She was thirty-nineish, and her “wide, hurt eyes” (Scott Fitzgerald) were more desperate than ever. Fitzgerald said that if Joan had to lie in a movie, “she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British.”2 Jack Warner jumped in with a new offer of $500,000 for three pictures. There wasn’t too much to lose: Crawford was primed for a big challenge—but it had to be the right material, something fit for a star and those rueful eyes.
Warners had bought the rights to the James M. Cain novel Mildred Pierce, published in 1941. But one story editor at the studio understood its problem: “As Cain wrote the novel all the characters in it, including Mildred, were unpleasant. It is well known that in a successful motion picture the audience must be able to identify itself with the interests of certain good characters as against certain bad ones. At the same time the immoral activities of Mildred actually were unscreenable because of the Production Code.”3
Warners had had doubts about a project full of marital breakdown, lousy parent-daughter relations, adulterous sex, and Cain’s regular estimate that people were obsessed with money and sex. Bette Davis had declined the part. Then Barbara Stanwyck refused it. There were early troubles in getting a script that the Breen Office would contemplate without fits. But Crawford remained keen to do it: Mildred was her idea of a social upstart becoming a success. Jack gave the project to Jerry Wald, a writer who wanted to produce. Michael Curtiz was lined up to direct, much against his will. And Ranald MacDougall was charged with cleaning up Cain’s act. It was Wald who had the idea of telling the story in flashback as a police station confession; it was MacDougall who cut a lot of the sexual wandering. But Curtiz was obstinate. He didn’t want to do the picture, and that was rare in a man blessed with chronic versatility—hadn’t he done Robin Hood, Casablanca, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, making a hit out of James Cagney’s impersonation of George M. Cohan (and helping Cagney get his Oscar)? But on Crawford, he was outspoken: “She comes over here with her high-hat airs and her goddamn shoulder pads! I won’t work with her. She’s through, washed up.”4
Then cameraman Ernie Haller worked out a way to photograph Crawford, with a noir shadow line on her forehead, so those eyes felt more needy. And in the event Curtiz made the novelette look like silky trash. There is a more recent version of Mildred Pierce, done by Todd Haynes for HBO (2011), with Kate Winslet in the lead. It is far more faithful to Cain, and it works away at social realism, but it misses the melodrama that Curtiz caught so well: the HBO series is 336 minutes; the 1945 Mildred Pierce settles for 111. You can still feel the shock over the daughter Veda’s treachery (played with glittering spite by Ann Blyth, aged sixteen). The Warners version stretched audience expectations about what was decent, and how an abandoned wife might have to look after herself. There were women alone and broken homes after the war, as well as optimism renewed; and sometimes one became the other over a weekend. Mildred Pierce opened two months after Hiroshima. People make fun of Crawford nowadays, but she knew what crisis was and how important the role was. She understood Mildred (she had trouble ahead with her own children). She got the Oscar, and the film earned $5.6 million on a cost of $1.4 million.
Mildred Pierce and The Big Sleep contributed to those record profit numbers, and they promised surgent careers for the two stars. Yet it didn’t work out that way. Crawford would never have another success like Mildred Pierce. Bogart’s salary nearly doubled with Casablanca, but after The Big Sleep he did one flawed picture after another, some of them movies that the ordinary Bogart fan hardly knows: Conflict, Dead Reckoning, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Dark Passage, Key Largo. Louise Brooks said that the tough guy was too accustomed to doing as he was told. Key Largo and Dark Passage were with Bacall again, and they have better reputations. But the second is contrived, once you get over the gimmick of Bogart being the camera, and Key Largo (despite the direction of John Huston) is a talky piece of soul-searching where Bogart and Bacall are overshadowed by Edward G. Robinson doing his most deliciously odious gangster, Johnny Rocco, sweating in his bath, snarling past his cigar and whispering obscene promises in Bacall’s ear, and by Claire Trevor, who is outstanding as Rocco’s aging mistress.
But as Bogart faltered after The Big Sleep, and chose or accepted dubious roles, so Bacall—a sensation in her debut—quickly became a difficult actress to cast and someone who seemed to have lost her appeal. At twenty-five, she didn’t look like the public idea of her. Or did she ever understand it? That teenage wanton that Hawks noticed was impossible in other eyes, including her own. To see her in Young Man with a Horn (1950, another Michael Curtiz picture), playing an acidic, self-destructive, probably lesbian “intellectual,” is to marvel that anyone let her take the role. It also throws welcome attention on the other woman in that film, the vibrantly fresh Doris Day, a buttercup who might be the child of Joan Blondell.5
For the best part of ten years, Doris Day had been a band singer, with Les Brown. She did plenty of radio, and she had a hit with “Embraceable You,” which spoke to every wartime relationship undergoing separation. She was singing at a party in Los Angeles when the idea arose that she might step in for a pregnant Betty Hutton in Romance on the High Seas (1948), where she sang “It’s Magic.” Warners put Day under contract; she proved their most lucrative signing in the postwar years and a way back to musicals for the studio. For the most part these were smotheringly cheerful, lightweight get-togethers that failed to use Day’s sturdy personality. The titles tell the story: My Dream Is Yours, It’s a Great Feeling, Tea for Two, I’ll See You in My Dreams, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, On Moonlight Bay, Lucky Me. Gordon MacRae and Gene Nelson were her regular partners; there were sweet, cheery songs; and Doris was encouraged to make decent fun of the proceedings—without ever revealing that she could be funny or sexy.
The films made money; the public cherished Day. But two of them deserve special attention. Calamity Jane (1953) was Jack Warner’s attempt to rip off Annie Get Your Gun with the invention of a tomboy singing heroine out West. But one of its songs, the lush “Secret Love,” by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster, was a big success, and it would be taken up by the gay community as an anthem. Doris was not gay—indeed, she had a track record with disastrous men. But she is spunky and bold as Calamity. The next year, she did Young at Heart, with a melancholy Frank Sinatra. This is a drama in which he is a depressed songwriter who drifts into a household of women (it includes Dorothy Malone and Ethel Barrymore). There is a suicidal edge to the story, and Doris rose to it. One longs for more films with her and Sinatra as a team, just as she must have wished that Warners would trust her as an actress.
But here was the studio once tied to male stars and manly attitudes, trying to promote Bacall, Crawford, and Doris Day—and Jane Wyman. In 1946, Jerry Wald was doing all he could to persuade the studio to do Johnny Belinda, the rural Canadian story of a deaf-mute girl who is raped. This plight called out for the wide-eyed apprehension of Jane Wyman. Wald could see the picture—like a perfect holdup. He wrote to Steve Trilling in the front office:
You know, frankly, what I should do is take the notes I wrote you on Mildred Pierce and just substitute Johnny Belinda, because they all run down the same road, primitive stories told in a slick, new fashion. When are you going to get wise to the fact that you can tell a corny story, with basic values, in a very slick, dressed-up fashion. When you tell a corny story in a corny fashion, you end up with junk. Certainly there is no cornier story than Humoresque. Let’s face it. But it is so slickly mounted that you forget this is the tired, old mother-love story and find, as a substitute a triangle story with a mother, son and married woman.6
Humoresque was the next Crawford vehicle, in which Joan played a society woman involved with a brilliant, headstrong violinist (played by John Garfield, but with Isaac Stern’s hands on the strings). This was written by Clifford Odets, with some scorn, and audiences found it far-fetched and overheated. Producing it, Wald had tried to keep Crawford’s image ordinary—he wanted plainer clothes and fewer boxed shoulders—then somehow Joan’s eyes just made the shoulders grow. But Johnny Belinda worked: that slickness turned out as greased pathos, and it won an Oscar for Wyman, impetus that would help her end her marriage to Ronald Reagan, a supporting player at Warners whose career seemed to be trailing away. Wyman was past thirty, playing a far younger girl, but the novelty of her ordeal carried the day. So twice in four years, with Joan and Jane, Warners had carried off the Best Actress Oscar.
The new openness to women at Warners was still a guys’ game. And some guys did hanker after old habits. Gangster films had been put on hold during the war lest they give a misleading impression of the home of the brave while sacrifices were being made. But there were stirrings. Two young writers, Ben Roberts and Ivan Goff, were given a brief treatment (by Virginia Kellogg) and told to come up with a gangster story. They went away, thought, and came back to the effective head of production, Steve Trilling: “We’d like to do Ma Barker and have the gangster with a mother complex and play it against Freudian implications that she’s driving him to do these things, and he’s driving himself to self-destruction. Play it like a Greek tragedy. They said, ‘Fellas . . . ?’ We said, ‘Believe us, it will work. And there’s only one man who can play this and make the rafters rock. That is Jimmy Cagney.’ ”7
This presented a problem. Cagney had walked away from Warners after Yankee Doodle Dandy and vowed never to return. Jack Warner didn’t want him back. The two men were fixed in loathing. But Cagney’s independent career had had its setbacks: he had lost a lot of money adapting William Saroyan for The Time of Your Life. So he agreed to play Cody Jarrett in White Heat: it was the best film he would ever make. This was under the direction of Raoul Walsh, who had joined the studio in the late thirties and done a string of fine pictures: High Sierra, The Strawberry Blonde (with Cagney), Gentleman Jim (Errol Flynn as boxer Jim Corbett), Pursued (a psychological Western, with the young Robert Mitchum).
But White Heat relied on its script and the novel idea that a gangster might be mentally disturbed—in a mother-loving way. Jarrett is an older Cagney, a man of innate violence who dreads his debilitating headaches and sometimes curls up on his mother’s lap. I suggested earlier that Bette Davis could have played this scene, but that should not detract from the somber compassion that Margaret Wycherly brings to it. The lap scene is still breathtaking, not just unexpected and close to farce, but filled with emotional madness. Since it began, the Warners gangster picture had believed in mothers, but now that came with pathology. You could play White Heat with Psycho so that each film enriched and explained the other.
White Heat is a gangster picture, with Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran ably delivering the slut wife and the treacherous associate. But it is also a study in betrayal, with Edmond O’Brien as the undercover agent who infiltrates the Jarrett gang but comes to earn Cody’s misplaced fondness. More than any other gangster Cagney played, Cody Jarrett is on the edge of tragedy. He will destroy himself because he cannot handle the headaches or the confusion in his own being.
The most emblematic scene is in the mess hall of the prison holding Cody. He sees a newcomer and asks for news of Ma. That question is relayed down a line of prisoners at the mess table, and then the stricken answer comes back, carried by prisoners horrified at their own message. When Cody learns that Ma is dead, he erupts—there is no other word, he is like a dancing puppet in neuronal frenzy. The emotion is human but the drive comes from insanity. The other actors and the extras were amazed at Cagney’s wildness, and the scene ends on this force of nature with half a dozen guards trying to restrain him.
Yet this wonder was nearly spoiled. Jack Warner was reluctant to make it an expensive scene. Instead of a mess hall he wanted to set it in a chapel with just a few extras. Walsh asked for the studio machine shop as the setting and a few hundred extras, guaranteeing to get the scene in half a day.8 Grudgingly, Jack agreed. It may be that that pressure stimulated everyone in one of the essential moments in Warners history. We have always wanted to idealize gangsters, and that reveals something reckless in us, something that was catered to in the movies. It is still hard not to be impressed by White Heat, to the point of demented exultation when Cody explodes with, “I made it Ma! Top of the world!” But I don’t think it’s a movie that ever inspired kids to love gangsters—watching Lear does not set you up to be a king. That Cagney and Margaret Wycherly were not even nominated only helps us appreciate how in the dark we can be at the movies.
There were mixed feelings over the film. Bosley Crowther ruminated at the bitter irony of a gangster story still being applauded.9 Cagney himself had grown troubled by his outlaw reputation. This was the spirit of reform in which he had wanted to show Cody’s pain and his damage. He wrote a personal promo for the picture: “White Heat points up dramatically and vividly the tremendous advances made in scientific detection. . . . It is bound to have a beneficial effect. . . . We are trying to make a gangster picture that will be a good gangster picture, a picture that will pay its way by helping deter crime.”10
Perhaps it worked that way, or perhaps the film business—and Warners especially—was trying to avoid the truth, that it had defined and released a dangerous energy for all of us taught to dream, only to discover that the dream can hit a dead end. Decades later, we would have to learn how far Michael Corleone, Tony Soprano, and Walter White spoke to the unease and anger at being free yet imprisoned in a world of ruined dreams. We long to be outlaws, or to live by night.
There’s a footnote to this part of the story. A few years after White Heat, a very good film was made, Love Me or Leave Me, based on the relationship between the singer Ruth Etting and her gangster lover, Marty “The Gimp” Snyder. It is a blend of musical and crime story such as Warner Bros were known for. And as written by Daniel Fuchs (who had done The Hard Way for Warners), it is a study of creativity and exploitation (of passion and slickness), trying to live together. The film has exceptional performances from Doris Day and Jimmy Cagney. It has songs like “Ten Cents a Dance” and “I’ll Never Stop Loving You.” Daniel Fuchs shared an Oscar for his script. But it was made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by stars who had given up on Warners.
Studio identity was collapsing along with box office figures. By 1948, it was clear that the audience was in retreat, and that shift would accelerate as television became a new habit. In this crisis, the studio would try anything it could think of—3D, CinemaScope, films about teenagers, or even projects so artistic or perilous that a Warner brother would once have derided them. So it was that Warners made the movie of A Streetcar Named Desire.
The Tennessee Williams play had opened on Broadway in 1947 and been a sensation. This wasn’t just because of the daring treatment of sexuality in ways bound to offend the Production Code, but because the production, by Elia Kazan, had identified a new level of naturalistic acting, associated with the Actors Studio, that would soon be called the Method. It was a play about Blanche DuBois, but the production had centered on Marlon Brando playing an emotional gangster—Stanley Kowalski sweeps the crockery off the dinner table the way Cagney had once served grapefruit for breakfast.
