Volume 44, Number 18 · November 20, 1997
Looking Good
By Michael Wood
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood
by Todd McCarthy
Grove, 756 pp., $35.00
Who the Devil Made It
by Peter Bogdanovich
Knopf, 849 pp., $39.95
The Big Sleep
by David Thomson
British Film Institute, 73 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Howard Hawks American Artist
edited by Jim Hillier, by Peter Wollen
British Film Institute, 252 pp., $19.95 (paper)
'You looked good,' Humphrey Bogart says to Lauren Bacall toward the end of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). 'Awful good.' He's right, of course. She looks great throughout the film, even if her clothes and manner do turn suggestiveness into a form of overstatement. But that is not what he means. In spite of his phrasing, Bogart is not at this moment talking about Bacall's looks in the expected sense. She has just distracted a killer's attention so that Bogart can shoot the man instead of getting shot. She was able to think fast in spite of her fear, she seemed cool although she didn't feel it. Looking good is a way of being good; in this context the only way. You keep your wits when most people would lose them, and you are seen to keep them; presence of mind is a kind of performance. Style is not just style here, but there is no efficacy without it.
Review, 5475 words
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