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The Big Sleep

Of the two film presentations of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, 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 ever made by Hollywood, along with Double Indemnity (for which Chandler helped write the screenplay), The Maltese Falcon, Out the Past and Laura. And it is a great one.

Two things bother me about it though. For one, much of the criticism of The Big Sleep as being too complicated comes from this film, rather than the book. Legendary director Howard Hawks admitted he couldn't follow the story and noted that even Chandler didn't know 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 back-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 even out-Chandler's 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, especially between the two leads.

However, this brings up the second problem in The Big Sleep movie. Bogie and Bacall. We love them together. But they 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. It's Bogie and Bacall, after all.

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 supposedly shows Martha Vickers as the younger sister and Dorothy Malone as the bookstore manager stealing the spotlight from Bacall. Before the film was finally released in 1946 the studio had Vickers's sexy (for then) scenes cut and and had more glamorous, sympathetic shots of Bacall inserted, building up the relationship between her and Bogie.

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

But this nitpicking might 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 the rest of Chandler's books. Too bad this didn't happen.

Someone who did play Marlowe twice however is Robert Mitchum. Unfortunately he was too old for the role in both cases. The sleepy-eyed actor had made his name in several notable 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 that was an unexpected hit.

This success led to a re-filming of The Big Sleep around Mitchum two 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 present (that is, the 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 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, it reflects the book's text even better than the 1946 film, 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 in Farewell, My Lovely anyway). He better 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, so we're quite happy to settle for that and maybe enjoy the later British incarnation as a curiosity, or not.

Several other notable actors have portrayed Marlowe over the years in adaptations of Chandler's other works—Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, Elliott Gould—some true to the original Chandler character and some completely revisionist. But one of the most interesting may be James Caan as an older, more vulnerable Marlowe in the 1998 TV movie made from Poodle Springs. 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, but still vital, good-hearted guy we might expect him to be by then. 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.

— Eric