Sabrina

Audrey Hepburn’s fame is so divorced from the actual movies she made that it’s likely many people who think they adore her haven’t even taken the time to watch Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, or Breakfast at Tiffany’s, to see for themselves just how boring they all are. Of those four, the one I can tolerate is Sabrina, but after re-watching it this weekend, I felt strongly that the nearly two-hour film was twenty minutes too long. Sabrina showcases Hepburn’s natural charm and her unusual, captivating screen presence, as well as her striking fashion choices, via French fashion designer Givenchy. But the movie lumbers along at a much too contented pace as Sabrina woos—and is wooed by—two brothers, played by Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. (Bogart was thirty years her senior, while Holden was just eleven years older.) Sabrina is the daughter of their chauffeur, so the movie gets to “examine” the class structure. (It’s not all that convincing.) By the time Sabrina made up her mind, I was frankly bored and not too thrilled with her choice. But the first half of the film has a lot of lovely moments. The director, Billy Wilder, knows how to create a mood. Sabrina is lit beautifully, capturing the enchanting quality of studio films of the 1950s. It’s also kind of a somber reflection on unrequited love up to a point, a sort of 1950s take on what it was like to be Juliet, only Sabrina doesn’t commit suicide (she tries), and she eventually does get what she wants. She’s so obsessed with William Holden’s character that when she returns from a two-year stay in Paris (for culinary school) all dolled up and all grown up, she wants to recreate his romances with other girls, the ones she would spy on from a tree-top when she was a girl. Maybe there’s a little of Fatal Attraction in there, somewhere. There’s also a distressing kind of cultural and economic prophesying in this movie: The corporation the two brothers work for (which is owned by their father) is developing all kinds of plastics, which are indestructible even to fire, and Bogart mutters with a perverse sense of pleasure that some day soon they’ll probably be able to eat the plastic. How naïve we were then to think we weren’t hurting ourselves—and our planet—with our inventions of convenience. Come to think of it, many romantic comedies of the 1950s were about mildly-career-driven women (like Doris Day) dating men who worked for big corporations making strange new inventions that are strangely normal to us now.

Marked Woman

A good example of the kinds of fun roles actresses got to play in the 1930s: Bette Davis is a hostess at a popular nightclub that's just been taken over by a mobster named Johnny Vanning (played by Eduardo Ciannelli). She lives with four other women who work at the nightclub, and there's an early shot of them walking home from work in their fancy cheap coats. They're tough and they've weathered a lot of storms. Something about their camaraderie makes Marked Woman memorable, even though the film isn't all that great. The uninspired plot involves Humphrey Bogart as an assistant district attorney trying to pin Vanning to several unsolved murders. The courtroom scenes are rather pedestrian. But that Bette Davis fire is certainly here. She's so good, even when her performance is overwrought and over-the-top, that you can't take your eyes off her. (When Vanning smacks her, she looks back at him with contempt, never even flinching.) Davis and the other girls are a formidable team of tough-as-nails broads (and I use the term affectionately). They're played by Lola Lane, Isabel Jewell, Mayo Methot, and Rosalind Marquis. With Jane Bryan and Allen Jenkins. Directed by Lloyd Bacon. 1937.

The Maltese Falcon

If the actors in The Maltese Falcon (1941) talked any faster, they'd be unintelligible, and if they talked any slower, the film wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. This is the kind of thriller that thrives on quick wit and quick words, and proves how a cadre of rotten-to-the-core characters can be appealing and turn a movie into a true classic. Humphrey Bogart heads the cast as Sam Spade, the cynical private eye who's hired by Mary Astor to help her get hold of a jewel-encrusted statue, one whose existence is the stuff of legend. So many people have died trying to get it--or trying to keep it, for that matter--that it seems foolish to imagine that anyone else would want to come near it. But like a magnet, it attracts people of questionable character who can't help themselves but respond to its pull. Peter Lorre, as the fiendish Mr. Cairo, gives a really marvelous performance. His facial expressions stir up all kinds of feverish suggestions in our minds, and what actually takes place in his performance in the form of gestures and tone of voice is very subtly villainous. He's got a "foreign-ness" that typecast him as such, and yet he's so good at playing that kind of sophisticated but sleazy character. Sydney Greenstreet, as The Fat Man, is appropriately greedy in his quest for the falcon and appropriately conniving in his slick method of getting people to do his bidding for him.

Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Written and directed by John Huston. With Lee Patrick, Elisha Cook, Gladys George, Barton MacLane, Ward Bond, and Jerome Cowan. 101 min. ★★★½

The Big Sleep

For my money, The Big Sleep (1946) is the best detective thriller ever made. Let's forget, for the moment, that the plot is at times incomprehensible (more on that later). It's the film's shadowy stylishness and gaudy L.A. decadence--a sort of bowdlerized decadence, emblematic of Hollywood's most conservative era, when everything taboo had to be referred to in code--that makes The Big Sleep an explosive, hugely entertaining movie. Of course, it's the chemistry between Humphrey Bogart--as the hardboiled private eye Philip Marlowe--and Lauren Bacall--as the spoiled socialite whose father hires Marlowe to protect his other daughter from a blackmailer--that turns The Big Sleep into more than a thriller. This was their second film together (after 1944's To Have and Have Not), and by the time it was released, Lauren Bacall was Mrs. Humphrey Bogart.

The plot has so many confused threads that trying to figure it out is a fool's errand. As the famous behind-the-scenes legend goes, nobody (including the film's three scenarists, Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett, and William Faulkner) could figure out who was responsible for one of the film's murders, and even Raymond Chandler, on whose novel this film was based, was stumped when consulted about the matter. Nobody minded much, because The Big Sleep was too much fun to concern itself with the dreary demands of a lucid plot. (I'll be the first to carp when a movie is deliberately convoluted, but in this case, the confusion seems to further this film's dreamlike mood: it's the most entrancing of the 1940's film noirs.)

The DVD comes with two versions of the film: the 1946 theatrical release, and the 1945 pre-release, which was shown overseas to American soldiers. The studio heads called for a number of significant changes after the film was initially completed and shown overseas--including the addition of several more scenes with Bogie and Bacall, cashing in on their considerable spark--and these changes, most agree, improved the film.

Directed by the great Howard Hawks. With John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Peggy Knudsen, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Charles D. Brown, Bob Steele, Sonia Darrin (uncredited), Elisha Cook, Louis Jean Heydt, and Dorothy Malone. Remade in 1975 with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. 116 min. ★★★★