Big Sleep

Chandler's novel is romantic, fog-bound, and depressing.—Bruce Kawin

The point is that Hawks had no intention of putting Bogart through the kind of professional crisis an moral self-examination basic to a picture like The Maltese Falcon and to Chandler's novel.—Bruce Kawin

One of the best-known of all Hollywood anecdotes involves the movie's confusing plot, based on the equally confusing novel by Raymond Chandler. Lauren Bacall recalls in her autobiography, "One day Bogie came on the set and said to Howard, 'Who pushed Taylor off the pier?' Everything stopped." As A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax write in "Bogart," "Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking whether the Sternwood's chauffeur, Owen Taylor, was murdered or a suicide. 'Dammit I didn't know either,' " Chandler recalled. And Chandler later wrote to his publisher, "The girl who played the nymphy sister (Martha Vickers) was so good she shattered Miss Bacall completely. So they cut the picture in such a way that all her best scenes were left out except one. The result made nonsense and Howard Hawks threatened to sue... After long argument, as I hear it, he went back and did a lot of re-shooting."

It is typical of this most puzzling of films that no one agrees even on why it is so puzzling. Yet that has never affected "The Big Sleep's" enduring popularity, because the movie is about the process of a criminal investigation, not its results.

The process follows private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) as he finds his way through the jungle of gamblers, pornographers, killers and blackmailers who have attached themselves to the rich old general (Charles Waldron) and his two randy daughters (Bacall and Vickers). Some bad guys get killed and others get arrested, and we don't much care--because the real result is that Bogart and Lauren Bacall end up in each other's arms. "The Big Sleep" is a lust story with a plot about a lot of other things.

That can be seen more clearly now that an earlier version of the film has surfaced. "The Big Sleep" was finished by Warner Brothers in 1945, but held out of release while the studio rushed to play off its backlog of World War II movies. Meanwhile, ongoing events greatly affected its future. Hawks' "To Have and Have Not" (1944), Bacall's screen debut, was an enormous hit, and the onscreen chemistry between her and Bogart was sizzling ("You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.") Bacall then starred opposite Charles Boyer in "Confidential Agent" (1945) and got withering reviews. And she and Bogart were married (she was 20, he was 44).

Bacall's powerful agent, Charles Feldman, who disliked the version he saw, wrote studio head Jack Warner in desperation, asking that scenes be eliminated, added and reshot. Otherwise, he warned, Bacall was likely to get more bad reviews, damaging the career of a promising star who was married to the studio's biggest money-maker.

Warner agreed, and Hawks returned to the sound stages with his actors for reshoots. Bacall's book minimizes this process: "Howard ... did need one more scene between Bogie and me." Actually, he needed a lot more than that. The 1945 release, now restored by archivists at UCLA, is accompanied by a detailed documentary showing what was left out and what was brand new when the movie was finally released in 1946.

What Feldman missed, he said, was the "insolence" that Bacall showed in "To Have and Have Not." In the original version of "The Big Sleep," the relationship between Bogart and Bacall is problematical: Marlowe isn't sure whether he trusts this cool, elegant charmer. The 1946 version commits to their romance, and adds among other scenes one of the most daring examples of double entendre in any movie up until that time. The new scene puts Bacall and Bogart in a nightclub, where they are only ostensibly talking about horse racing:

Bacall:"...speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first. See if they're front-runners or come from behind... I'd say you don't like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the back stretch, and then come home free...."Bogart:"You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go." Bacall:"A lot depends on who's in the saddle."

What you sense here is the enjoyable sight of two people who are in love and enjoy toying with one another. The new scenes add a charge to the film that was missing in the 1945 version; this is a case where "studio interference" was exactly the right thing. The only reason to see the earlier version is to go behind the scenes, to learn how the tone and impact of a movie can be altered with just a few scenes. (The accompanying documentary even shows how dialog was redubbed to get a slightly different spin.)

As for the 1946 version that we have been watching all of these years, it is one of the great film noirs, a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler's ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares. Working from Chandler's original words and adding spins of their own, the writers (William Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett) wrote one of the most quotable of screenplays: It's unusual to find yourself laughing in a movie not because something is funny but because it's so wickedly clever. (Marlowe on the "nymphy" kid sister: "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.") Unlike modern crime movies which are loaded with action, "The Big Sleep" is heavy with dialogue--the characters talk and talk, just like in the Chandler novels; it's as if there's a competition to see who has the most verbal style.

Martha Vickers was indeed electric as the kid sister, and Dorothy Malone all but steals her scene as a book clerk who finds Marlowe intriguing. But the 1945 version makes it clear Bacall was by no means as bad as Feldman feared she was: She is adequate in most scenes, and splendid in others--but the scenes themselves didn't give her the opportunities that the reshoot did. In scenes like the "racing" conversation she has the dry reserve, the private amusement, the way of sizing up a man and enjoying the competition, that became her trademark. It's astonishing to realize she was 20, untrained as an actor, and by her own report scared to death.

Bogart himself made personal style into an art form. What else did he have? He wasn't particularly handsome, he wore a rug, he wasn't tall ("I try to be," he tells Vickers), and he always seemed to act within a certain range. Yet no other movie actor is more likely to be remembered a century from now. And the fascinating subtext in "The Big Sleep" is that in Bacall he found his match.

You can see it in his eyes: Sure, he's in love, but there's something else, too. He was going through a messy breakup with his wife, Mayo, when they shot the picture. He was drinking so heavily he didn't turn up some days, and Hawks had to shoot around him. He saw this coltish 20-year-old not only as his love but perhaps as his salvation. That's the undercurrent. It may not have been fun to live through, but it creates a kind of joyous, desperate tension on the screen. And since the whole idea of film noir was to live through unspeakable experiences and keep your cool, this was the right screenplay for this time in his life.

Howard Hawks (1896-1977) is one of the great American directors of pure movies ("His Girl Friday," "Bringing Up Baby," "Red River," "Rio Bravo"), and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in many different kinds of genre material. He once defined a good movie as "three great scenes and no bad scenes." Comparing the two versions of "The Big Sleep" reveals that the reshoots inserted one of the great scenes, and removed some of the bad ones, neatly proving his point.—Roger Ebert

AMC Filmsite, Tim Dirks

The Big Sleep (1946) is one of Raymond Chandler's best hard-boiled detective mysteries transformed into a film noir, private detective film classic. This successful adaptation of Chandler's 1939 novel was from his first Philip Marlowe novel. [Chandler took segments of two of his own, previously-published stories that appeared in Black Mask magazine: "Killer in the Rain," and "The Curtain."] It was directed by the legendary Howard Hawks, scripted by Nobel laureate William Faulkner (with additional assistance from Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman), and scored by composer Max Steiner.

The Big Sleep is the best example of a classic Warner Bros. mystery. It is a very complex, confusing, logic-defying whodunit with a quintessential private detective (Marlowe), false leads, unforgettable dialogue and wisecracks, raw-edged characters, sexy women (including the two daughters of a dying millionaire, a bookseller, and others), tough action, gunplay, a series of electrifying scenes, and screen violence. Although a classic film noir, it has no flashbacks, no voice-over narration, and little evidence of expressionistic images. The film was not recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in any of its award categories.

The main protagonists in the convoluted film appear equally as confused about the plot (the who did what to whom, what, when, and why questions) during clue-chasing as audiences on first viewing. [The seven killings are marked below by numbers - one of the seven occurred before the film's action.] What makes things especially perplexing is that important characters involved in the plot never appear alive on screen (e.g. Owen Taylor and Sean Regan), several other characters appear only momentarily or are rapidly dispatched, and important information is deliberately missing.

The Production Code of the time wouldn't have condoned the exposition of explicit details of portions of the depraved plot anyway (the references to drug use, Carmen's nymphomania, the pornography racket, and the homosexual relationship between Lundgren and Geiger). Without a voice-over narrative, the audience is allowed to follow the point-of-view experiences of the detective and conclude what they want about his search for solutions to the confused puzzle. What is much more important than the basic blackmail-murder plot is the stylish method and process of the private detective's quest, that the viewer identifies with and shares, as he makes his way through the murky world of nasty crime from one oppressive setting to the next, or from one wicked character, fallen woman, or femme fatale to another, until eventually discovering love with his female protagonist.

Although the film was released in mid-1946, it was actually filmed mostly in the fall of 1944 (about six months before Bacall and Bogart were married). [Pictures of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on walls, in the Acme Book store, and in the detective's office hint that the film was shot mainly in late 1944, and finished in early 1945. By mid-1946 when the film was released, after awaiting the release of other war-themed films, FDR had been dead for a year.]

In 1997, the original 1945 pre-release version of the film was discovered - it was the film originally intended for release by Warner Bros, but shelved (except for a few showings overseas to US troops in August 1945). The dialogue in the recently-restored first version, with a total of eighteen never-before-seen minutes, rendered the incomprehensible, labryinthine plot more clearly by revealing plot points. But the pre-release version did not include two of Lauren Bacall's re-shot scenes found only in the second version - their second bedroom scene at the Sternwoods and the notorious nightclub scene with racy dialogue about horse-racing and saddles.

The commonly-seen version of this big-budgeted film included some of the toughest, most sexually-electric, innuendo-filled dialogue in film history between its two main leads, Bogart and Bacall (an off-screen romantic couple fulfilling their romance on-screen). Their sexy pairing in Hawks' earlier To Have and Have Not (1944) was one of the main reasons why new scenes were shot (e.g., the famous 'horse-race' dialogue) and the film was re-worked - to emphasis the stars' earlier 'chemistry,' romance, and insolent interplay. This follow-up film was the second of five films that brought Bogart and Bacall together:

To Have and Have Not (1944), d. Howard Hawks
The Big Sleep (1946), d. Howard Hawks
Two Guys From Milwaukee (1946), d. David Butler; Bogart and Bacall appear in cameos
Dark Passage (1947), d. Delmer Daves
Key Largo (1948), d. John Huston
The atmosphere of the film is dark and paranoic - full of suspicion, dread, and intrigue. The film's title, The Big Sleep, refers to death. Blackmailers and murderers commit their ill deeds (gambling, pornography, vice, perversion) while the world continues on its course, almost asleep. Marlowe's single-handed pursuit and investigation of pervasive corruption and treachery is met with deception, threats of extermination, and violence (although most of the killings are discreetly committed off-screen). Robert Mitchum reprised the role of Marlowe in the remade UK classic mystery The Big Sleep (1978), with the setting transferred from a 1940s Los Angeles to an updated 1970s London.

The Story
Behind the credits, a silhouetted couple light cigarettes, and then leave them burning in an ashtray. In the opening sequence, an unidentified hand and finger press in the doorbell buzzer of a mansion doorway. A hard-boiled, laconic, intelligent, and cynical private detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) arrives at a lavish mansion. [Bogart played the part of Marlowe only once.] The Los Angeles gumshoe is there to consult with wealthy, aging and dying, dessicated, wheelchair-bound "General" Sternwood (Charles Waldron), a rich widower:

My name's Marlowe. General Sternwood wanted to see me.

On the way in, he meets one of the General's two alluring and sexy daughters, the younger, troubled, errant, thumb-biting, frequently doped-up nymphomaniacal heiress Carmen (Martha Vickers), wearing a white polka-dot miniskirt. He notices her legs after she descends the stairs. Capriciously, she tells him:

Carmen: You're not very tall, are you? Marlowe: Well, I, uh, I try to be. Carmen: Not bad looking. Oh you probably know it. (while twirling and biting a lock of her hair)
Marlowe: Thank you. Carmen: What's your name? Marlowe: Reilly. Doghouse Reilly. Carmen: That's a funny kind of name. Marlowe: You think so. Carmen: Uh, uh. What are you? A prizefighter? Marlowe: No, I'm a shamus. Carmen: What's a shamus? Marlowe: It's a private detective. Carmen: You're making fun of me. Marlowe: Uh, uh. Carmen (she leans back and falls into his arms, throwing herself at him): You're cute.

Marlowe tells the butler, Norris (Charles Brown): "You ought to wean her, she's old enough." In the humid, hot greenhouse filled with orchids, Sternwood is introduced to Marlowe. [Carmen could accurately be described as a 'hothouse orchid' herself.] He permits Marlowe to drink and smoke:

Sternwood: How do you like your brandy, sir? Marlowe: In a glass. Sternwood: I used to like mine with champagne. Champagne cold as Valley Forge and with about three ponies of brandy under it...I like to see people drink...You may take off your coat, sir...Too hot in here for any man who has any blood in his veins. You may smoke, too. I can still enjoy the smell of it. Nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

The emaciated Sternwood describes the dreariness of his existence. The humid hothouse is necessary for his survival and he is waiting for death - the "big sleep" of the title - in the temperature-controlled greenhouse:

Sternwood: You are looking, sir, at a very dull survival of a very gaudy life - crippled, paralyzed in both legs, very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider. The orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids? Marlowe: Not particularly. Sternwood: Nasty things! Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

Marlowe, who used to work for the district attorney's office "was fired for insubordination - I seem to rate pretty high on that," knows about Sternwood's two daughters: "Both pretty, and both pretty wild." The detective is told that Sternwood is being blackmailed again by gambler and petty blackmailer Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt), who was earlier paid $5,000 "to let my younger daughter alone." Sternwood questions his reaction to his words:

Marlowe: Hmm. Sternwood: What does that mean? Marlowe: It means - hmm.

Marlowe is called in to break up the troublesome blackmail ring that threatens to apply further pressure, ostensibly forcing Sternwood to pay legally-uncollectible gambling debts. A secondary aim is to have Marlowe find his missing friend and confidant, Sean Regan, who suddenly disappeared a month earlier under mysterious circumstances. [In Chandler's novel, Sean Regan was son-in-law "Rusty" Regan, who was married to Sternwood's oldest daughter Vivian.] Regan was Sternwood's bodyguard and close companion, an Irish Republican Army adventurer who acted as the General's surrogate son-substitute. Sean Regan had handled the first case of blackmail, but now that he is missing "without a word," Marlowe must be employed [as a substitute for Regan - one surrogate son hired to ascertain the whereabouts of another]:

Sternwood: You knew him too? Marlowe: Yes, in the old days, when he used to run rum out of Mexico and I was on the other side. We used to swap shots between drinks, or drinks between shots, whichever you like. Sternwood: My respects to you, sir. Few men ever swapped more than one shot with Sean Regan. He commanded a brigade in the Irish-Republican Army - you knew that. Marlowe: No I didn't...I know he was a good man at whatever he did. No one was more pleased than I when I heard you had taken him on as your...whatever he was. Sternwood: My friend, my son almost.

Marlowe is asked to investigate Carmen's ostensible blackmailer - a suspicious porno "rare book" dealer Arthur Gwynn Geiger (Theodore von Eltz) on North Sunset, who is blackmailing Sternwood over "gambling debts" incurred by his youngest daughter. There are numerous $1,000 IOU's signed by Carmen, one being dated September 11th, 1945. [The exact nature of the blackmail is not clear, though it may be that Geiger has illicit, nude, incriminating or obscene photographs of Carmen and threatens to circulate them. Or perhaps the IOU's are for gambling debts or drugs. Whatever is going on, Carmen cannot pay the blackmail and signs IOU's that Geiger tries to cash with General Sternwood.] Sternwood doesn't intend to discuss these things with Carmen: "If I did, she'd just suck her thumb and look coy." Marlowe describes how Carmen had met him in a similar fashion:

I met her in the hall and she did that to me. Then she tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.

The General compares the morality of his two daughters. The older daughter, Vivian, is fiesty and strong. The spoiled, sexually-perverse, younger daughter is named Carmen:

They're alike only in having the same corrupt blood. Vivian is spoilt, exacting, smart and ruthless. Carmen is still a little child who likes to pull the wings off flies. I assume they have all the usual vices, besides those they've invented for themselves. If I seem a bit sinister as a parent, Mr. Marlowe, it's because my hold on life is too slight to include any Victorian hypocrisy. I need hardly add that any man who has lived as I have and who indulges for the first time in parenthood at my age deserves all he gets.

The well-paying job offer is specifically to end Geiger's blackmail permanently and just get rid of him: "I guess you want me to take this Geiger off your back." Marlowe thanks the General for the drink and promises to be back in touch:

Marlowe: Thanks for the drink, General. Sternwood: I enjoyed your drink as much as you did, sir.

On his way out, he tells the butler Norris that his normal fees are $25 dollars a day plus expenses. Marlowe is not pleased that Norris has informed Vivian Sternwood Rutledge (Lauren Bacall), the General's other daughter, about his identity:

Norris: Are you attempting to tell me my duties, sir? Marlowe: No, just having fun trying to guess what they are.

Before he leaves, Marlowe (now sweating profusely with a soaked shirt) is introduced to the ice-cool, elder daughter Vivian who was once married and then divorced to an anonymous man named Rutledge - never seen in the film [In the Chandler novel, Vivian had been married and divorced three times]. There are memorable lines of clever dialogue in his provocative, yet inauspicious, competitive and bickering first encounter with her in her bedroom as she seductively cross-examines him and probes into the reason why he is being hired as a "private detective" by her father:

Vivian (taunting): So you're a private detective. I didn't know they existed, except in books. Or else they were greasy little men snooping around hotel corridors. My, you're a mess, aren't you? Marlowe: I'm not very tall either. Next time, I'll come on stilts, wear a white tie and carry a tennis racket. Vivian: I doubt if even that would help. Now this business of Dad's. You think you can handle it for him? Marlowe: It shouldn't be too tough. Vivian: Really? I would have thought a case like that took a little effort. Marlowe: Not too much. Vivian: What will your first step be? Marlowe: The usual one. Vivian: I didn't know there was a usual one. Marlowe: (with a lisp) Oh sure there is. It comes complete with diagrams on page forty-seven of 'How to Be a Detective in Ten Easy Lessons' correspondence school textbook. And, uh, your father offered me a drink. Vivian: You must have read another one on how to be a comedian. Marlowe: Did you hear what I said about the drink? Vivian: I'm quite serious, Mr. Marlowe, my father...
Marlowe: I said your father...
Vivian: (She doesn't get him a drink.) Help yourself! Now look, Mr. Marlowe. My father's not well, and I want this case handled with the least possible worry to him. Marlowe: That's just the way I was going to handle it. Vivian: I see. No professional secrets? Marlowe: Nope. Vivian: I thought you wanted a drink. Marlowe: I've changed my mind. Vivian: Then what - ? (She turns away and walks toward the window to open it.) How did you like Dad? Marlowe: I liked him. Vivian: He liked Sean, Sean Regan. I suppose you know who he is. Marlowe: Uh, huh. Vivian: You don't have to play poker with me, Mr. Marlowe. Dad wants to find him, doesn't he? Marlowe: Do you? Vivian: Of course I do. It wasn't right for him to go off like that. He broke Dad's heart, although he won't say much about it. Or did he?

She is spoiled, aloof, smart, and playful, and very protective of her younger sister and aging father. [Vivian visually dominates the film's frames in these early scenes.] Mutually attracted to each other, they trade loaded lines with each other. She is suspicious of him and wants to know what her father has asked him to do - she is fearful that he has been hired to find Regan, who has disappeared:

Marlowe: Why don't you ask him? Vivian: You know, I don't see what there is to be cagey about, Mr. Marlowe. And I don't like your manners. Marlowe: I'm not crazy about yours. I didn't ask to see you. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them long winter evenings. And I don't mind your ritzing me, or drinking your lunch out of a bottle, but don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me. Vivian: People don't talk to me like that. Marlowe: Ohhh. Vivian: Do you always think you can handle people like, uh, trained seals? Marlowe: Uh, huh. I usually get away with it, too. Vivian: How nice for you. Marlowe: Just what is it you're afraid of? Vivian: Dad didn't want you about Sean at all, did he? Marlowe: Didn't he? Vivian: Would you find him if Dad wanted you to? Marlowe: Maybe. When did he go?

He learns that a month earlier, Regan just drove off one afternoon without saying a word and has disappeared. Authorities found his car parked in a private garage. Marlowe is amused but perplexed to learn that she assumes he has been hired to find Regan rather than end Geiger's blackmailing threats. He admits that although he knows about Regan, he hasn't been hired to find him:

I'm wasting your time. Goodbye, Mrs. Rutledge.

Marlowe begins his investigation in the Hollywood Public Library, researching titles of collector's edition books. The blonde, bespectacled librarian (Carole Douglas) slyly and appreciatively observes that he doesn't look like the typical collector:

Librarian: You know, you don't look like a man who'd be interested in first editions. Marlowe: (retorting) I collect blondes and bottles too.

He searches for Geiger - the blackmailer, by going to A. G. Geiger's rare books and deluxe editions Hollywood bookstore. Playfully disguised as an effeminate bookworm (or homosexual) with sunglasses and an upturned hat, he talks to Geiger's salesclerk, Agnes Lozelle (Sonia Darrin). Asking for a rare third edition of Ben Hur - a book that doesn't really exist - he realizes she knows little about rare books:

Marlowe: Would you happen to have a Ben-Hur, 1860? Agnes: A what? Marlowe: I said, 'Would you happen to have a Ben-Hur, 1860'? Agnes: Oh, a first edition? Marlowe: No, no, no, no, no. The third. The third. The one with the erratum on page one-sixteen. Agnes: I'm afraid not. Marlowe: Uh, how about a Chevalier Audubon 1840 - a full set, of course? Agnes: Not at the moment. Marlowe: You do sell books? Hmm? Agnes: What do those look like, grapefruit? Marlowe: Well, from here, they look like books. Maybe I'd better see Mr. Geiger?

And when a respectable looking businessman, a client, is buzzed into the back room, this confirms Marlowe's feelings about Geiger's disreputable business (a front for a blackmail racket or for a high-class lending library of pornographic, dirty books for subscribers only). Across the street from the bookstore, Marlowe waits for Geiger to materialize, viewing the store from the front window of the Acme Book Store with a spectacled, antiquarian bookseller clerk (Dorothy Malone) who is quickly charmed:

Clerk: Is there something I can do for you? Marlowe: Would you do me a very small favor? Clerk: I don't know. It depends on the favor. Marlowe: Do you know Geiger's bookstore across the street? Clerk: I think I may have passed it. Marlowe: Do you know Geiger by sight? Clerk: Well, I ...
Marlowe: What does he look like? Clerk: Wouldn't it be easy enough to go across the street and ask to see him? Marlowe: I've already done that...Do you know anything about rare books? Clerk: You could try me. Marlowe: Would you happen to have a Ben-Hur 1860, Third Edition with a duplicated line on page one-sixteen? Or a Chevalier Audubon 1840? (She searches her listings and bibliographies)
Clerk: Nobody would. There isn't one. Marlowe: The girl in Geiger's bookstore didn't know that. Clerk: Oh, I see. You begin to interest me - vaguely. Marlowe: I'm a private dick on a case. Perhaps I'm asking too much, although it doesn't seem too much to me somehow. Clerk: Well, Geiger's in his early forties, medium height, fattish, soft all over, Charlie Chan mustache, well-dressed, wears a black hat, affects a knowledge of antiques and hasn't any, and, oh yes, I think his left eye is glass. [While describing Geiger, the Clerk openly ogles Marlowe as if to compare his body (favorably) with Geiger's.] Marlowe: You'd make a good cop.

As a heavy rain begins to fall, he proposes that they have a drink of rye (from a bottle in his pocket) while he waits for Geiger to come out - with a suggestive line: "I'd rather get wet in here." The independent bookseller pulls the shade and closes an hour early, removes her eyeglasses and lets her hair down coyly: "It looks like we're closed for the rest of the afternoon." She also offers two cups for their drinking. Marlowe can't believe the quick transformation, and greets her with an exaggerated "Hello," before they enjoy an afternoon dalliance together - suggested by the film's fadeout. Later, (after the rain has stopped), as Marlowe leaves the bookstore, he non-chalantly says goodbye to the character who has given him an observant, professional description of Geiger:

Marlowe: Well, thanks. Clerk: If you ever want to buy a book...? Marlowe: Ben-Hur, 1860? Clerk: With duplications? So long. Marlowe: So long, pal.

Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe is tough without a gun and lethal with a wisecrack in this irresistible rerelease
The Big Sleep
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1946). Raymond Chandler reckoned Bogart's Philip Marlowe the best interpretation of his wisecracking detective. Philip French
Saturday 1 January 2011 19.05 EST Last modified on Friday 29 November 2013 09.14 ES
First released in 1946 and now being revived for selected screenings around the country and an extended run at the National Film Theatre, The Big Sleep is a film of infinite interest. In its famously knowing trailer, Humphrey Bogart walks into the Hollywood Public Library and asks for "a good mystery like The Maltese Falcon". A librarian gives him a copy of what is misleadingly described as "Raymond Chandler's latest", adding: "What a picture that'll make!" Well, it did, and the result can be approached from a number of distinct and complementary directions.

First, it's a Warner Brothers production, made at the height of Hollywood's big studio era and announced by Warner's logo, which looks like a federal badge of social responsibility. Jack L Warner, who'd headed the studio since the early 1920s, determined what films were made, how and by whom, their cost and which contract performers appeared in them; their smart, stocky, wisecracking heroes looked a lot like Warner himself.

Second, The Big Sleep is a tough, sophisticated crime picture built around Bogart as LA private eye Philip Marlowe. All but two of his best films were made at Warners. After some years as a secondary figure on different sides of the law, he'd become a true star in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and an enduringly major one in Casablanca (1943). To Have and Have Not teamed him with his future wife, the newcomer Lauren Bacall, 25 years his junior, in a second world war drama that set out to imitate Casablanca. When in late 1944 early screenings for American forces found its successor, The Big Sleep, too dark, the opening of the film was delayed as lighter, sexier sequences were shot.

Together, Bogart and Bacall became iconic figures, sharing cigarettes and exchanging wisecracks on and off screen. An excellent, handsomely illustrated study of Bogart has just been published in paperback, Bogie (Palazzo £14.99), with essays by Stephen Bogart, Richard Schickel, George Perry and Alistair Cooke.

Third, The Big Sleep is being shown at the NFT in a two-part season of films directed by Howard Hawks (1896-1977), a spiky figure who could turn his talent to every genre while imposing himself stylistically and thematically on whatever he made. Camera movements were functional; his rapid dialogue challenged industry practice; a casually understated professional respect existed between his heroes; his confident heroines demanded and were accorded equality.

The Cahiers du cinéma critic- film-makers proclaimed him an auteur. But he was a hard-headed film-maker and, deep in debt as a result of his grand lifestyle and gambling, he had to make concessions in production costs on The Big Sleep. He engaged major writing talents such as his old friend William Faulkner and his personal discovery, Leigh Brackett, a Hawksian woman with a great ear for dialogue who went on to write Rio Bravo and The Empire Strikes Back.

Fourth, The Big Sleep is based on Chandler's first novel. Educated, like PG Wodehouse, at Dulwich College in London, he'd settled in Los Angeles before Cecil B DeMille arrived there to shoot The Squaw Man in 1914, and he became a defining chronicler of the city. He coined the term "the big sleep" to describe death: two years later it was quoted as the last words of a notorious gangster.

A dozen actors have impersonated Marlowe on film, radio and TV, and Chandler, whose ideal exponent would have been Cary Grant, thought Bogart the best. In a 1946 letter to his British publisher, he said: "Bogart is so much better than any other tough-guy actor. As we say here, Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also he has a sense of humour that contains that grating undertone of contempt."

Finally, The Big Sleep is invariably described as a film noir, a term coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1945 when a flood of dark Hollywood thrillers made during the war eventually arrived on Parisian screens after the four years of German occupation. Nearly 40 years passed before the term became current in the English-speaking world. The time of day in The Big Sleep is appropriately night, with rain and fog the dominant climatic conditions. But the influence of German expressionism is absent, there's no hard-boiled narration, no angst-ridden hero, no distorted camera angles, no nightmares, no ominous shadows, no flashbacks. Bogart and Bacall's exchanges are wittily playful, and the only femme fatale is a minor though crucial figure who destroys that perennial noir fall-guy, Elisha Cook Jr. But it's unmissable, irresistible.

DMU Timestamp: August 05, 2016 15:53

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