Lose the Veil

It captivated New York and then London as movies with an L.A. imprimatur rarely do, dazzling critics and inspiring dozens of newspaper and magazine stories. Now it’s coming back to the town where it all began for an exclusive five-day run. Not bad for a film that’s simultaneously more than 50 years old and brand-new.

Discovered and restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the original prerelease version of Howard Hawks’ filming of Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” thrilled audiences at its debut at a pair of sold-out screenings at last July’s UCLA Festival of Preservation. For five days starting Friday at the Nuart in West Los Angeles, those who missed out and those who only heard about the film after all the New York hoopla can catch up on the cause of the fuss.

Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in a tangled story of kidnapping and murder among the gangsters and high society of L.A., “The Big Sleep” is one of the most beloved of American films. So it’s a shock to be exposed to this rare alternate version that is as involving as it is unusual.

When a studio re-shoots and reedits a film, a great and usually justified howl is heard about the virtues of the original. What is so provocative about the two cuts of “The Big Sleep,” both made with Hawks’ approval, is that most viewers would likely consider the second version superior.

“The Big Sleep” finished shooting in January 1945 and was ready for release soon after. But since World War II was winding down, studio head Jack L. Warner decided to shelve it and give priority to films that were connected to the war and would consequently date. One of those was ‘Confidential Agent,” which co-starred Bacall and Charles Boyer and disappointed audiences used to the sassy actress of “To Have and Have Not.”

The increasing success of “To Have” compared to the dud reaction to ‘Confidential Agent” did not go unnoticed. As related in memos published in Rudy Behlmer’s “Inside Warner Bros.,” Bacall’s agent Charles K. Feldman wrote Warner suggesting her part be beefed up to take advantage of her new celebrity.

“Give the girl at least three or four additional scenes with Bogart of the insolent and provocative nature that she had in ‘To Have and Have Not,’ ” he wrote, adding that in that film, “Bacall was more insolent than Bogart and this very insolence endeared her in both the public’s and the critics’ mind when the picture appeared. It was something startling and new. If this could be recaptured through these additional scenes with Bacall and Bogart, which frankly I think is a very easy task, I feel that the girl will come through for you magnificently.”

Feldman had other problems, including a scene in which Bacall wears a honeycomb-patterned veil he particularly detested, and Warner agreed with his diagnosis. So in January 1946, a full year after the original wrap day, the cast and crew reassembled for six days of re-shoots of material written by Philip Epstein, best known for partnering with brother Julius on “Casablanca.”

Eighteen minutes of footage from that re-shoot made it into the release version of the film, including two of the best-remembered scenes from the movie. One has Bogart’s Marlowe bringing home an intoxicated Carmen Sternwood and confronting not the butler of the original but sister Vivien Sternwood, played by Bacall. Their dialogue has a racy edge (‘Carmen’s easy--men know that--you have to work longer and harder on me” is one of Vivien’s lines) but that was just a warmup.

Because it turns out that “The Big Sleep’s” most classic encounter, when Marlowe and Vivien discuss each other’s romantic potential in horse-racing terminology, was one of the added elements. “You’ve got a touch of class, but I don’t know how far you can go,” Marlowe says. Vivien ripostes, “It depends on who’s in the saddle,” and so on into the night.

To make room for those new scenes, 20 minutes was cut from the 1945 version, including the shots of Bacall in the veil that Feldman hated. More important, a key nine-minute exposition scene in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office that carefully recaps who killed whom up to that point was snipped out. So, paradoxically, the Bogart-Bacall interaction that Feldman and Warner knew would secure “The Big Sleep’s” popularity also helped create its reputation as a film with a famously incomprehensible plot.

According to Todd McCarthy, author of “Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood,” “A comparison of the two versions reveals ‘The Big Sleep’ as the indisputable turning point in its director’s career. The first cut represents the culmination of Hawks’ dedication to narrative, to classical storytelling principles, to the kind of logic that depends upon the intricate interweaving of dramatic threads. The revised, less linear cut sees him abandoning these long-held virtues for the sake of ‘scenes,’ scenes of often electrifying individual effect, but scenes that were weighed heavily in favor of character over plot and dramatic intensity.”

Until UCLA restored its print of the 1945 version, it had only been seen by collectors and servicemen who were based overseas at the end of the war. Friday night’s opening 8:45 show will be introduced by UCLA preservation officer Robert Gitt, the man behind the rediscovery, and all screenings will be accompanied by a comparison reel of differences between the two versions. It’s an eye-opening experience.

BE THERE

“The Big Sleep,” playing Friday through Tuesday, Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.