THE BIG SLEEP (1946 FILM)

'''The Big Sleep''' (1946) is the first film version of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel of the same name. It stars Humphrey Bogart as the hard-boiled private-eye Philip Marlowe and his eventual real-life wife Lauren Bacall as the femme fatale. The film was directed by Howard Hawks and is an example of the film noir genre. William Faulkner cowrote the screenplay with Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman.
In 1997, the United States Library of Congress deemed this film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Contents

Plot

Background

Main cast and characters

Other cast members

Critical reaction

Re-release

Awards

Trivia

Notes and references

External links

Plot

Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) visits his new client, General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), presumably to take care of some gambling debts of his younger daughter, Carmen (Martha Vickers), to a bookseller named Geiger. The older daughter, Vivian (Lauren Bacall), suspects that her father is more concerned with finding out what happened to her father's friend, Sean Regan, who had mysteriously disappeared a month prior.

Shortly afterwards, Marlowe finds Geiger shot dead in his home. An unidentified man flees the scene, leaving Carmen inside, high on drugs. Marlowe finds a camera in the house with the film missing. Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt) has the film and is attempting to extort money from Sternwood by threatening to implicate Carmen in the murder.
Later, it is revealed that Sternwood’s chauffeur, Owen Taylor, shot Geiger. Brody merely clubbed Taylor unconscious and took the film. He left Taylor in the car, which was later driven off the pier. The story soon focuses on the mystery at the heart of the film: the whereabouts of Sean Regan.
Eddie Mars (Joe Ridgely) owns the house that Geiger lived in, and also owns a gambling establishment frequented by Vivian. Marlowe first meets Mars while he is investigating the Geiger murder. The two offer to help each other. However, Mars becomes decidedly less friendly when Marlowe asks about Sean Regan, who had presumably run off with Mars’ wife. Vivian is anxious for Marlowe to close the case after the resolution of the Geiger matter, and to stop him from inquiring about Regan. Marlowe is curious why Mars isn’t more interested in finding his wife, and why so many people don't want him to find Regan.
It is later revealed, at least implicitly, that Mars convinced Vivian that he has proof that Carmen had murdered Regan, and had been using this to compel Vivian’s cooperation. Meanwhile, Mars’ wife in fact did not run off with Regan at all, but was merely hiding out to make it look like she did. Mars hopes that this will keep the cops from making him a suspect. Marlowe eventually convinces Vivian to help him instead of Mars, and Marlowe figures out that it was Carmen who killed Regan out of the jealousy of his affair with Mars' wife. After a final shootout back at the Geiger house, Marlowe sets up Mars to be shot by his own men. Marlowe makes Vivian promise to institutionalize Carmen if he doesn't turn her over to the police.

Background

The film is fondly remembered for its extremely convoluted plot. A famous story tells that, during filming, the director and screenwriters could not figure out who had killed chauffeur Owen Taylor or if he had committed suicide. They sent a cable to the author. Chandler later relates this story to a friend in a letter and he recalls "They sent me a wire... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either".^[1]
After the film was completed, it was shelved while Warner Bros. worked to release a backlog of war-related films. It was decided that since the war was drawing to a close, public interest in these films would be substantially less after its conclusion, whereas ''The Big Sleep'' had no such time sensitivity requiring a more immediate release. (A careful eye will spot many indications of ''The Big Sleep'' being shot during the war, such as ration stamps and dialogue, and pictures of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. There is also a female cabbie, who states "I'm your girl".)
Once the war ended, the "Bogie & Bacall" phenomenon caused by ''To Have and Have Not'' as well as their subsequent marriage, was in full swing. Bacall's agent requested that portions of the film be reshot to capitalize on her newly attained celebrity. Studio head Jack Warner agreed, and new material, such as the suggestive "horse racing" scene, was added (even though, contextually, it makes no sense whatsoever). Parts of the ending were also reshot, with Peggy Knudsen in the part of Mona Mars, as the original actress, Pat Clark, was unavailable. While there is only a difference of two minutes in the run time of both versions, there is over twenty minutes of different footage between them. In its revised form, ''The Big Sleep'' made its theatrical debut on 23 August 1946.
The theatrical release of the film is generally regarded as better. Although some consider it to be more confusing and more difficult to follow (it lacks, for example, a long, stilted conversation between Marlowe and the Los Angeles District Attorney in which the facts of the case thus far are discussed), most argue that the performance and pairing of Bogart and Bacall makes up for it.
For an example of this view, see Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" essay on the film.[1]

Main cast and characters

	Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe
	Lauren Bacall as Vivian Sternwood Rutledge

Other cast members

John Ridgely	as Eddie Mars
Martha Vickers	as Carmen Sternwood
Dorothy Malone	as Acme Bookstore proprietress
Peggy Knudsen	as Mona Mars
Regis Toomey	as Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls
Elisha Cook Jr.	Harry Jones

Critical reaction

Film critic Roger Ebert, who entered the film in his list of 100 Great Movies, praises the film's writing:
:''"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."''
The Washington Post Critics Corner calls the film ''"an unqualified masterpiece."''
Although the film's reception was overwhelmingly positive a number of critics, whilst commending the performance of the leading actors have criticised the film for its convoluted and difficult to follow plot. Carlo Cavagna said of the film: ''"Bogart and Bacall are so good together that the story's impenetrability doesn't matter much."''[2]
Empire magazine added The Big Sleep to their Masterpiece collection in the October 2007 issue.

Re-release

In the late 1990s, a prerelease print — Hawks' original cut — was discovered in the UCLA Film and Television Archives. Apparently, this version had been released to the military to play for troops stationed in the south Pacific. A consortium of benefactors led by Hugh Hefner raised the necessary funds to restore the print, and it was released to specialty houses for a short theatrical run, along with a documentary comparing the differences between it and the studio release version. A DVD containing both versions of the film was released in 2000, along with an edited down version of the comparison documentary.

Awards

★ Library of Congress (1997) U.S. National Film Registry.

Trivia

★ The author of the novel, Raymond Chandler, claimed that Martha Vickers gave an incredible performance as Carmen Sternwood, so much so that she completely overshadowed Lauren Bacall in her scenes. Unfortunately, this led the powers that be to edit the film in such a way that much of Vickers' performance ended up on the cutting room floor.^[2]

★ Although Martha Vickers plays Lauren Bacall's younger sister, in reality she was only eight months her junior.

★ The henchmen Sidney and Pete are named as a tribute to Bogie's frequent costars Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.

★ The film was made during the age of censorship, wherein certain points were expected to be able to be picked up by the adult audience but missed by children. The sort of books that Geiger rents quite profitably are mentioned in the book as pornography, which at the time was illegal and associated with organized crime. The photograph of Carmen wearing a "Chinese dress" and sitting in a "Chinese chair" is also supposed to allude to this.

★ Joe Brody is killed by Carol Lundgren who believes he killed Geiger. In the book Lundgren and Geiger are homosexual lovers. This is not mentioned in the film.

★ In the novel Marlowe finds pornographic photos of Carmen and later on discovers her naked in his bed, but sends her packing. In the film, there is no suggestion of nudity: the photos merely show that Carmen was at Geiger's house at the time of his murder. In the bedroom scene she is shown awaiting Marlowe fully clothed, sitting in his armchair.

Notes and references

1. Hiney, T. and MacShane, F. "The Raymond Chandler Papers", Letter to Jamie Hamilton, 21 March 1949, page 105, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000
2. Hiney, T. and MacShane, F. "The Raymond Chandler Papers", Letter to Jamie Hamilton, 30 May 1946, page 67, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000

External links

★

★

★ 10 Shades of Noir

★ Noir Film Analysis

★ Roger Ebert's Review

★ skyjude - movie legends