The Big Sleep

Like Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe is a character created not just in one stand-out piece of literature but over a whole fictional career. And not just a memorable character is created and developed thusly, but so is a setting, a social milieu, an attitude, a view of the world. We may represent this creation with one or two titles on the greatest literature list but they represent the whole oeuvre. When we see popular adaptations of Doyle's and Chandler's creations, we see them in the wider context of all that we've read and heard and seen of those iconic figures.

Which is a roundabout way of announcing that we'll look at all Marlowe-centred films here, not just the Big Sleeps.

Marlowe by any other name
The first appearance of Marlowe onscreen went by most people because he wasn't really Marlowe in it.

The flick was The Falcon Takes Over (1942), which came out just two years after the novel it adapts, Farewell, My Lovely, and just three years after Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep. The Falcon Takes Over is the third in a long series of light films, the first four of which star George Sanders as the amateur detective known as the Falcon.

Somehow Chandler's plot is shoehorned into the series here with Marlowe replaced by the Falcon and his rough-and-tumble gumshoeing becoming Sanders' happy-go-lucky sleuthing. Some of the important secondary characters are present—especially, ex-con Moose Malloy who's looking for his Velma—but so are some very UnChandleresque characters, like the detective's goofy sidekick and humorous cops.

So...disaster as a Marlowe film, but entertaining on its own merits. And one of the best, most substantial Falcon films, still watchable today, if you can forget Marlowe.

Only two years later, what some consider the definitive Farewell, My Lovely, known in the United States as Murder, My Sweet, came out, starring Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe and Mike Mazurki as a memorable Moose Malloy. (More on this film to come.)

Bogied Marlowe
Of the two film presentations of The Big Sleep itself, the 1946 movie with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall is of course the favourite. It remains not only the most popular rendition of any Chandler novel, but is usually cited among the handful of greatest film-noir classics made by Hollywood, along with Double Indemnity (for which Chandler helped write the screenplay), The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past and Laura. And it is a great one.

Two concerns about it though. For one, much of the criticism of the novel The Big Sleep as being too complicated comes from this film. Legendary director Howard Hawks admitted he couldn't follow the story and noted that even Chandler couldn't advise him who killed one of the characters (the Sternwoods' driver). It probably didn't help having the brilliant, but often difficult, novelist William Faulkner working on the script-writing team. Or maybe the plot inevitably became too dense when it was compressed into a two-hour flick.

This movie is very faithful to the book in terms of plot—except for a little cutting down on the themes of pornography and homosexuality for the 1940s movie audience and an ending suggesting an ongoing romance between the Bogie and Bacall characters. And, oh yeah, there's a half-hearted attempt to suggest a solution to the unsolved murder.

But the black-and-white film is so moodily stylish, and the two leads crackle with such sexual tension, that the narrative complexities can be overlooked. The dialogue out-Chandlers Chandler at times. Where the novel has Marlowe describing his encounter with the youngest of the Sternwood girls with "She tried to sit in my lap", the film has Bogart saying, ""She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up." There's gunfire and beatings and gorgeous dames aplenty, but it's mainly a movie of terrifically entertaining verbal warfare, particularly between the two leads.

However, this brings up the second problem: Bogie and Bacall. We love them together. But Bogie and Bacall weren't in the book. In Chandler's hands, Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood spar briefly near the beginning, he helps her out of a jam in the middle and they don't get back together again until near the end—all without much indication they're falling for each other. She's above him socially and he's above her morally. The film though makes them into a doomed pair of would-be lovers.

Apparently The Big Sleep was filmed a year and a half before it was released but it was held back to give war films priority. A cut of The Big Sleep as it stood in 1945 is said to show both Martha Vickers as the younger sister and Dorothy Malone as the bookstore manager stealing the spotlight from Bacall. Before the film was released in 1946 the studio had Vickers's sexy scenes cut and more glamorous, sympathetic shots of Bacall inserted, building up the relationship between the big sister and Marlowe.

As for Bogart, he's replaying his role of Sam Spade opposite Mary Astor's femme fatale in The Maltese Falcon from a few years earlier. His Marlowe may be seen as Hammett's detective embittered by the earlier experience, more cynical than ever. Chandler's Marlowe is more of an idealist, always ready to give a guy or gal a break whether he or she deserves it, a man who refuses to be hardened by the corruption he deals with daily.

But this nitpicking could give the wrong impression. The Big Sleep is closer to the novel than you might expect of Hollywood, a film you want to go on and on, despite the intricacies of plot. You want to see Bogart continue to play Marlowe in adaptations of the rest of Chandler's books. Too bad this didn't happen.

Sleepy Marlowe
Someone who did play Marlowe twice however is Robert Mitchum. The sleepy-eyed actor had made his name in several notably dark films of the 1940s and 1950s (including the aforementioned Out of the Past), and so it was no surprise that he could take up the role of Chandler's anti-hero so comfortably as he did in 1975 when, in his upper fifties, he starred in a modest treatment of Farewell, My Lovely.

This Farewell, My Lovely was an unexpected hit. And no wonder. In the disco-versus-punk era of the mid-1970s it was a nostalgic throwback in style, writing and even actors to the cool of 1940s noir. Mitchum, who had starred in original noir such as Out of the Past, walks through the film as though Marlowe's clothes fit him because he's lived in them his whole life. Okay, in his mid-fifties he's a bit old for gumshoeing, but that just adds to the comfort level.

Ex-heavyweight boxing contender Jack O'Halloran also walks through his first movie role as Moose, his stiffness and slow-speaking menace perfect for the part. Charlotte Rampling smoulders as the beauty with something to hide. And watch for Sylvester Stallone in a very small, early role.

But mostly the film succeeds for its intelligent use of Chandler's text, one of the most faithful of all his adaptations, and its smoky cinematography, that even in colour takes one back to the morally grey days of black-and-filmmaking.

This success led to a re-filming of The Big Sleep (1978) around Mitchum a few years later. But what a difference. Mitchum is now hitting sixty. (I think Marlowe in the novel is supposed to be about thirty-eight.) But worse, the period has been updated from the 1940s to the then-present (1970s). And, far worse, the setting has been moved from the mean streets of Los Angeles to the civilized lanes of Britain. Yes, Marlowe is now a gumshoe in swinging London.

There may be a tiny bit of justification for this in author Chandler having been raised in England, and the script by director Michael Winner (best known for making the vigilante Death Wish movies) is not bad. Despite being about twenty minutes shorter than the 1946 film, it reflects the book's text better, taking huge chunks of voice-over and dialogue straight from the novel, as well as borrowing some from the earlier film. The line about meeting the younger Sternwood now becomes, "She tried to sit in my lap. I was standing up at the time." One improvement though: that one unresolved murder is finally explained.

But Chandler-Marlowe just doesn't work in 1970s England. And in sunshiny colour! The brooding moodiness is gone. Marlowe's no slumming angel but a solidly middle-class citizen. The sex and pornography themes are truer to the book, thanks to the more enlightened times, but the scandal attached to them is gone. Marlowe shadowing umbrella-wielding Britishers around London because they're buying and selling books of naked women?

Yet, in some ways Mitchum is a better Marlowe than Bogart. (He is better in Farewell, My Lovely anyway). He exemplifies the weary but still decent sleuth. One can only imagine what he could have done with the role in 1946. But we already have a classic Big Sleep from 1946 that we're quite happy to settle for. We may enjoy this later British incarnation as a curiosity. Or not.

A world of Marlowes
Several other noteworthy actors have portrayed Marlowe over the years in adaptations of Chandler's other works, some true to the original Chandler character and some completely revisionist.

Hollywood leading man Robert Montgomery directed himself as Marlowe in Lady in the Lake (1947), based on the Chandler novel of almost the same name, but we don't get to see much of him. That's because he adopts an innovative—and ultimately annoying—way of filming. Except for a brief prologue and epilogue, everything is shown only through Marlowe's eyes, so we see the protagonist only when he looks in a mirror.

Sounds interesting but it leads to some quite awkward situations that distance the viewer. Other actors have to interact with the Marlowe character in an artificial fashion—a kissing scene with Audrey Totter's lips approaching and eventually smothering the camera is reminiscent of a campy 3D horror film of the 1950s.

The story? Not bad but so much time is required for weird camera movements, as Marlowe turns his head and with other people walking in and out of view, that the usual problem of cramming a novel into a shorter medium is exacerbated. We barely skim this lake.

One of the most interesting of Marlowes may be James Caan as an older, more vulnerable Marlowe in the 1998 TV movie Poodle Springs made from Chandler's last novel, finished by Robert B. Parker. Set in 1963 and with a cute script by playwright Tom Stoppard, this is no film noir.

Marlowe has lived through the 1940s and 1950s and he is now the senior, somewhat tired but good-hearted guy we might expect him to be by then—and married to a young heiress. It's a long way from Bogie in The Big Sleep, but it's a natural progression of Chandler's character, probably the direction Chandler himself was taking him in.

The plot of Poodle Springs is confused and confusing as in the best Marlowe tradition, but our jaded hero still thinks and punches his way through it and around early sixties' California before discovering answers uncomfortably close to home (also in the best tradition) and involving a crazy dame with a gun (ditto). Happy ending though.

Not among the greatest Marlowe films but a nice way to see our hero off into Sunset Boulevard.

Not available on DVD, as far as I can tell, but it shows up on TV occasionally.

— Eric