The Big Sleep (1946)

This, the first film version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, was made in 1946 and the charge sometimes made of some films that ‘it‘s more style than content‘ was dreamed up far more recently. However, charging this version along those lines would not be wide of the mark at all.

Director Howard Hawk was keen to bring back together on screen Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall given the on-screen chemistry they had in his film To Have And Have Not, and in The Big Sleep it was again created.

Bogart had, five years earlier, made the Dashiell Hammett PI Sam Spade come to life in The Maltese Falcon and for many he is the definitive Spade, though he had been portrayed on screen by several actors before and Bogart‘s stint and was again in later films.

In The Big Sleep Bogart becomes the definitive Philip Marlowe and again many might argue that he is Marlowe. But he was also interpreted my several thesps, two years earlier by Dick Powell, and later by Elliott Gould and

Robert Mitchum and in the film Marlowe, though not based on a Chandler novel, not least Ballymena‘s favourite son, Liam Neeson, always good value in my book.

To my mind Powell also carries off the subtlety of Marlowe’s character, streetwise and tough but also intelligent and with some depths.

Mitchum does not so much and Gould not at all, though Mitchum, always a definite – and welcome – presence in any film, does provide his own, different version of Marlowe, though if not quite Chandler’s, still an interesting and engaging one nonetheless.

So, as in the Hammett film, in the Big Sleep we again get the slick wisecracking (‘How do you like your whisky?’ ‘In a glass’) and as well a kind of film noir look, though The Big Sleep is certainly not film noir. In other words, the ‘style‘ is spot on. As for content, however . . .

There’s certainly more than enough ‘content’ in The Big Sleep, but many, like me, wonder just what that content amounted and find yourself asking as the closing credits roll ‘who did what and why, who is the villain, why did he or she do this‘ and so on. Frankly, it is all as clear as mud.

Reportedly, novelist William Faulkner, who wrote the screenplay with Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, confessed even he didn‘t know what was going on. Brackett as hired when Hawk read one of the novels by Leigh Brackett and told his staff ‘Get me that guy, Brackett’ – Brackett was a woman.
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Chandler himself made a similar confession about plot confusion in one of his novels, although whether it was The Big Sleep or another I don‘t know.

So if you, too, are a tad baffled by it all and find it hard to follow the many twists and the supposed motives of the characters, don’t worry, there’s more of us out there.

And you might also get my point about Hawk’s The Big Sleep scoring so heavily on style. In less talented hands it might well have become a mess. As it is . . .

So, my advice is to give it a whirl, but don’t wasted too much time wondering what exactly is going on. You‘ll still enjoy it.