[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

This is to blame.

She was:

• Working next to me
  
• A rare thing
  
• Fine as:
  
  
  
  • a bee's wing
    
  • so fine a breath of air might blow her away
    
  
  
• A lost child
  
• Running wild
  
• Sleeping rough back on the Derby beat
  
• Even married once, to a man named Romany Brown
  

I was:

• Nineteen when I came to town
  
• In love with a laundry girl
  

We:

• Busked around the market square
  
• Picked fruit down in Kent
  
• Could tinker lamps and pots and knives wherever we went
  
• Was camping down the Gower
  
• Was drinking more in those days
  

They were:

• Burning babies
  
• Burning flags
  
• Calling it the Summer of Love
  
• Hawks and doves
  

She said:

• "As long as there's no price on love I'll stay"
  
• "You wouldn't want me any other way"
  
• "Young man, oh can't you see I'm not the factory kind"
  
• "If you don't take me out of here I'll surely lose my mind"
  
• "Oh man, you foolish man, it surely sounds like hell"
  
• "You might be lord of half the world, you'll not own me as well"
  

I said:

• "We might settle down, get a few acres dug"
  
• "Fire burning in the hearth and babies on the rug"
  

If I could:

• Just taste all of her wildness now
  
• Hold her in my arms today
  

I wouldn't:

• Want her any other way
  

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

Look, people are either likely to see The Big Sleep if they get the chance or not, right? But there are going to be some people with good intentions who never get around to it. To those people I say this: go see the damned thing if you ever get a chance. That's what movie theaters are for, after all.

The plot makes little sense. Somewhere in the transition from Chandler to Faulkner (who wrote the screenplay) by way of Leigh Brackett (who wrote an earlier version of the screenplay, and who much later wrote the first version of The Empire Strikes Back), some of the connective tissue of the novel vanished. No harm, as they say, and no foul. It's not so much the plot that matters; if you're seeing this movie, you ought to be seeing it for the lushness of the women and the dialogue and the violence. Virulent violence, really. There's nothing like a thug.

Lush really is the word. I mean, you can watch the actors just wallowing in the words. Doesn't hurt that Bogart and Bacall were falling madly in love, but Martha Vickers doesn't have that excuse and she was just as reckless with her verbiage as the rest. Ditto Dorothy Malone, but more so; ditto Regis Toomey and Elisha Cook, Jr. If Bob Steel isn't the model for every psychotic henchman ever filmed subsequently, I'll eat my hat.

Anyhow, go see the damned thing. It's good to be reminded where Sorkin and Whedon and all those other snappy dialogue young turks learned how to write like that.

"I don't mind if you don't like my manners, I don't like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings."

Snap!