Director: Howard Hawks
Country of origin and year of release: US, 1946
While rightly cited as a film noir classic, The Big Sleep has nonetheless regularly been criticised for having an unfathomable plot. Adapted from the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, The Big Sleep was the first of Chandler's novels to feature detective Phillip Marlowe.
Starring Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Regan, the elder of General Sternwood's two wild daughters, this film was the second pairing of Bogie and Bacall, following on from To Have And Have Not two years earlier. It's widely reported that the minimising of Martha Vickers role as Carmen Sternwood, the younger of the two sisters, was as a direct result of the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall. It might also be for this reason that the end of the film is ever so slightly tweaked, giving it a more sentimental, romantic feel than was the case with the book. Overall though, this is a faithful adaptation of Chandler's novel.
The story begins with Marlowe paying a call on a prospective client, the afore mentioned General Sternwood. In the course of his visit he also meets the giggling Carmen Sternwood, who makes something of a play for him, and discovers that General Sternwood is being blackmailed... again. Then there is the matter of Sean Regan, husband to Vivian and a protegee of the General, who has disappeared.
Part of the reason why the plot can be regarded as confusing (and one of the reasons why the film repays repeated viewing) is because there isn't just one plot. There's at least two, possibly three or four, and they interact with and entwine each other in a series of increasingly confusing ways that it can be very hard to keep track of. But... it almost doesn't matter. The fact that it constantly keeps you guessing is a key part of the film's charm, that and it's incredible sense of tension.
There's a particular scene in which Marlowe is in an apartment trying to interview a witness, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door and the entrance of a semi deranged already established character. Once that person has been got rid of, Marlowe resumes his investigation, but there is another knock at the door... and you feel a real shiver down the spine from the sense of impending doom that this moment brings.
Similarly, the script (and its source material) is so well crafted and developed that even minor characters are vivid enough for you to find yourself caring disproportionately about what happens to them.
Part of the fascination of film noir comes from watching the ways in which film had to find ways to negotiate the censorship self-imposed on Hollywood by the Hays code. How to navigate a swamp of violence and vice without breaching the moral standards Hollywood had chosen to impose on itself (at least on screen). You can see that tension in a noir classic such as Double Indemnity, not just because the crime is punished, but also in the language used between hero and femme fatale, and by what is shown and not shown. Similarly, there are aspects of noir that might seem weirder, or more shocking, today then they perhaps would have done at the time: The fascist collaboration that runs as an undercurrent beneath Gilda (the misogyny is, sadly, more of a given), the wilful disregard for preserving crime scenes (pretty much any noir, but especially, especially Laura, in which Dana Andrews cheerfully traipses all over the titular heroines home, and practically moves in, for a good fortnight or more) and the overall sense in which the spectre of World War II hangs over these films (most of them, but Witness For The Prosecution is a good tangible example of this.)
These are not nice stories; because these were not nice times. Discussions and debates around the representation of men and women in noir are well established, and are no doubt better, and more thoroughly discussed, elsewhere but it is worth noting that it was the 1944 psychological thriller Gas Light that gave us the phrase gaslighting and that, while not regarded as a noir, it was released a mere two years before The Big Sleep.
As for gender roles within The Big Sleep, Chandler's Marlowe tends to adhere to his own code as regards how he treats people, meaning that the women in Chandler books and their many adaptations tend not to come off as badly in terms of fate and characterisation as they might have done elsewhere at the time. Marlowe is a likeable guy; not a Peter Whimsey by any means, but certainly not an arsehole. More a lightly tarnished type than a full scale knight in shining armour: "Marlowe; the shop soiled Galahad" as a doctor in The High Window puts it. Similarly, Chandler's men and women tend to be a mixture of the good and the bad: Marlowe doesn't think much of either of the Sternwood women, but he comes to feel something (albeit something rather complex) for Vivian and doesn't seem to find it in himself to despise the exasperating Carmen. Indeed, for much of the film, he finds himself running around after and rescuing both of them to varying degrees. Similarly, there is a murder that takes place in the film that affects him more than any of the others and, with the viewer watching events unfold through his eyes, it's easy to see why.
The Big Sleep wasn't Marlowe's first on screen appearance, in fact you can find out more about the various ways in which the Phillip Marlowe stories were used and abused by Hollywood over on Tor.com, but it was the first - and only - time that he was played by Bogart. I haven't seen any of the other screen adaptations of Chandler's work so I can't comment on how well The Big Sleep compares to the on screen adaptation of Farewell My Lovely (another Marlowe classic), which was released under the title Murder, My Sweet in 1944. I would say that those two (and perhaps The Long Goodbye) are my favourite Marlowe stories though, so I suspect Murder, My Sweet would be worth checking out.
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