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| The beautiful, alluring original poster for Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep |
Philip Marlowe, a Los Angeles-based private detective, gets hired by an old general to get to the bottom of an extortion affair, but the case proves complicated, and the general's two daughters do not exactly make the sailing smoother...
The Big Sleep is written by Leigh Brackett (Rio Lobo (1970)), William Faulkner (The Road to Glory (1936)) and Jules Furthman (Nightmare Alley (1947)), adapting the same-titled 1939 novel by Raymond Chandler (The Little Sister (1949)), and produced and directed directed by Indianan master filmmaker Howard Hawks (The Road to Glory (1926)), whose 28th feature it was.
It is a fantastic film noir, and for me a tad better than The Maltese Falcon (1941), the other classic noir which is always mentioned as one of the greatest ever. This is because The Big Sleep is more uncompromising in that it doesn't seem to alter its characters to suit any plot ends at all.
The film is dirty and full of murders and twists, - despite submitting to the rigid Hays Code censorship regime of the period, the sinful truths are palpable. The snappy, sexy dialogue is worth staying totally silent for for the entire playtime; the screenplay is very deftly constructed.
The film is infamously puzzling, with no real denouement, and one of the funny trivia about The Big Sleep relates to the original author, Chandler's equal confusion and ignorance as to any resolution to his story: About a wire query sent to him by the screenwriters about one of the intricate plot's ends, Chandler later confided to a friend: "They sent me a wire ... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either"
The central allure of the film, is, of course, its stars: Humphrey Bogart (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)) and Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not (1944)) were growing flaming hot by the 1946 release of The Big Sleep, (a somewhat different version was released for troops only in 1945), both as a couple on- and off-screen. Perhaps the best movie star couple ever, they both exuded charisma, attraction and sex en masse, and sparks fly right and left when they take the screen in The Big Sleep together.
Cat-eyed Bacall, enormously feminine and somehow assertive and masculine at the same time, plays one of the deadliest femme fatales ever put on the silver screen in The Big Sleep, possibly the best film noir ever made. It is a film that simply reeks of SEX without having a single sex scene in it. A rare, electrifying film experience not to be missed.
The film noir genre label, by the way, was coined by French critics in love with the dark, American detective crime pictures of the 1940s and 50s, just as they were about to kick off their French New Wave with several films that were inspired by the anarchism, sex appeal and freshness of films like The Big Sleep. The 'film black' (a direct translation of film noir) are fatalistic, crime-focused, adult in themes and attraction and often have to do with double-crossing, murder and other evil deeds for personal gain.
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Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: 1.6 mil. $
Box office: 4.8 mil. $
= Box office success (returned 3 times its cost)
[The Big Sleep premiered 22 August (Atlantic City, New Jersey) and runs 114 minutes. Shooting took place from October 1944 - January 1945 on the Warner backlot in California. The shoot was protracted due to Bogart's drinking and marital problems that were eventually resolved in a divorce and his marrying co-star Bacall instead. The film was withheld from release, while the studio instead released their war-themed pictures around the end of WWII. A 2-minute longer 1945 version of the film was screened for servicemen. Re-shoots took place in January 1946, and 20 minutes from the original film were replaced. The film grossed 3.4 mil. $ (70.8 % of the total gross) in North America. Bogart and Bacall, who had already co-starred in Hawks' To Have and Have Not (1944) shared the screen in 2 more films: Delmer Daves' Dark Passage (1947) and John Huston's Key Largo (1948). Hawks returned with Red River (1948). Bogart returned with a voice performance in Never Say Goodbye (1946) and physically in Dead Reckoning (1946); Bacall in Dark Passage (1947). The Big Sleep is certified fresh at 96 % with an 8.80/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of The Big Sleep?
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