The Big Sleep (1946 film)
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| The Big Sleep | |
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| Directed by | Howard Hawks |
| Produced by | Howard Hawks |
| Written by | Novel: Raymond Chandler Screenplay: William Faulkner Leigh Brackett Jules Furthman |
| Starring | Humphrey Bogart Lauren Bacall John Ridgely Martha Vickers Dorothy Malone |
| Music by | Max Steiner |
| Cinematography | Sidney Hickox |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. |
| Release date(s) | August 23, 1946 |
| Running time | 1946 116 Min Original Cut 1945 114 Min Theatrical Release |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks, is the first film version of Raymond Chandler's novel of the same name (1939). It stars Humphrey Bogart as detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as the femme fatale. The Big Sleep is a prime example of the film noir genre. William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman co-wrote the screenplay.
In 1997, the U.S. Library of Congress deemed this film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and preserved to the National Film Registry.
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[edit] Plot
Private detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) calls on new client General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) at his Los Angeles mansion. As he waits in the foyer, the General's younger daughter, Carmen (Martha Vickers), flirts seductively with Marlowe. Marlowe is indifferent towards her flirtatious comments, leaving Carmen intrigued. He is then led by the General's servant into the sun room where he is introduced to the ailing but wealthy general, who wants to resolve gambling debts owed by Carmen to a bookseller named Alfred Geiger. The General also mentions the disappearance of a close friend, Sean Regan. As Marlowe begins to leave, he is stopped by General Sternwood's oldest daughter, Mrs. Vivian Rutlidge (Lauren Bacall), who questions Marlowe about what he is doing for her father. Vivian, who was recently divorced, suspects her father's true reason for calling in a detective is to find Sean Regan, his friend and companion who had mysteriously disappeared a month earlier. The general assumption, established as the film progresses, is that Regan has run off with a local gambler's wife, but Marlowe appears to distrust this instinctively.
Marlowe discovers that Alfred Geiger owns a rare book shop and dons a disguise as he enters the shop under the premise of searching for a certain book. Agnes, the unfriendly shop assistant, claims that they don't have the book Marlowe is looking for, nor any of the other books he inquires about. Marlowe begins to suspect that the book store is a front. As he is talking with Agnes, a man enters the back room where Marlowe sees stacks of books and paper. His suspicions are correct: Geiger is illegally selling pornographic books. He asks to see Mr. Geiger, but Agnes claims that Geiger is not in. Marlowe leaves the store and takes shelter in a bookstore across the street as it begins to rain. While there, he asks the store's female assistant whether or not she has ever seen Geiger. She replies that she has, and gives Marlowe a brief description of him. Marlowe and the attractive assistant begin to flirt, and he decides to wait for Geiger in the store. The assistant lowers the blinds and pulls out glasses of wine. It is assumed that the two sleep together.
Marlowe and the assistant remain in the store, waiting for Geiger. Marlowe glimpses Geiger leaving his bookshop and bids goodbye to the attractive assistant and follows Geiger to his home. Marlowe arrives at Geiger's home and intends to investigate. As he is getting out of his car, he notices Carmen's car pulling up. Marlowe gets out and begins peering into the other cars parked outside. Suddenly, he hears a gunshot and a scream, immediately followed by the quick getaway of several of the cars parked outside the home. Marlowe then enters Geiger's house, where he finds Geiger's dead body on the living room floor. Next to it he finds Carmen, high and dressed in an Asian dress, a subtle indication that she had somehow been modeling for Geiger's pornography books. Marlowe looks around the room and finds a statue with a camera hidden inside of it. The camera's film cartridge is empty. It becomes apparent that whoever shot Geiger also stole the film. Marlowe leaves the scene and returns Carmen to her home.
Marlowe returns again to Geiger's house, where he finds Carmen lurking outside, attempting to get inside. While inside, they find that the murder scene has been cleaned up, and Geiger's corpse nowhere to be found. They are then surprised by someone unlocking the front door. The man introduces himself as Eddie Mars (Joe Ridgely), the owner of the home, Geiger's friend, and a prominent local gambler. Marlowe and Mars share a brief conversation, where Marlowe claims that he is there working for Carmen. The two are looking for Geiger, who he claims gave Carmen "the loop."
Back in his office, Marlowe is alerted to the discovery of a car at the bottom of the ocean by his friend, an employee of the District Attorney. After arriving at the scene, Marlowe's friend questions him about his work for the Sternwoods and urges him to let go of the case. He discovers that the driver of the car, was a man named Owen, who previously worked for the Sternwoods and was in love with Carmen. It was Owen who slew Geiger, presumably in anger that he was extorting or exploiting Carmen.
Marlowe then visits the apartment of a man, Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt), who claims to have the missing film and is demanding money from Sternwood by threatening to implicate Carmen in Geiger's murder. Marlowe discovers that Brody had stolen the pictures from Owen, believing them to valuable. Brody claims that the theft occurred before Owen's car crash and death, though Marlowe implies that he is responsible for the Owen killing. At this point, Marlowe spots both Vivian and Agnes in the room, hiding behind a curtain. Agnes is an apparent collaborator with Brody, while Vivian appears to have come to deliver the blackmail money. A knock is suddenly heard at the door, and Marlowe tells Brody to answer it. Brody opens the door and is greeted at gunpoint by Carmen, who has come for her pictures. Marlowe takes them from Brody and sends Vivian and Carmen home. After the women leave, there is another knock at the door. As Brody opens it, he is shot and killed; the assailant runs down the stairs to escape. Marlowe follows and apprehends him, only to find that he is Carol Lundgren, a close associate of the murdered Geiger, who has killed Brody in revenge, falsely believing that he was Geiger's killer.
With Geiger's murder attributed to Owen, Owen's likely killer (Brody) now dead himself, and Lundgren turned in to the police for the Brody killing, Vivian Sternwood is anxious for Marlowe to close the case and stop his inquiries about Regan. Marlowe, meanwhile, is curious as to why Mars isn’t much interested in finding his wife, and why so many people don't want him to find Regan. Against the backdrop of the plot, as his search continues, he and Vivian are falling in love.
Continuing to pursue the Regan thread in the face of all resistance, Marlowe plows through a maze of intrigue involving yet another murder, several more tip-offs, a roughing up, and a faked holdup, eventually piecing together the truth: Mars has been blackmailing Vivian with proof that her sister Carmen murdered Regan, a crime of passion that the troubled girl committed from jealousy and rejection. Mars is helping to conceal Regan's death from the authorities, having placed his own wife in a hideout by the shore to fool police into believing that she and Regan have run off together. In this manner, he is able to compel Vivian's cooperation.
Imprisoned in Mars's home after being caught snooping, Marlowe convinces Vivian to turn against the gambler and free him. After a gun fight at the hideout and another at Geiger's house, Marlowe sets up Mars to be shot by his own henchmen. Pinning the Regan murder on Mars, Marlowe makes Vivian promise to intern Carmen at a psychiatric hospital in exchange for not turning her in to the police. With the burden of deceit lifted, the two unite with a kiss.[1][2]
[edit] Background
This version of The Big Sleep is remembered for its convoluted plot. Famous gossip is that during filming neither the director nor the screenwriters knew who killed chauffeur Owen Taylor or if he had killed himself. They sent a cable to Chandler who told this to a friend in a letter: "They sent me a wire... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either".[3]
After its completion, Warner Bros. did not release The Big Sleep until they had released a backlog of war-related films, because the war was ending and the public might find them uninteresting, whereas The Big Sleep's subject was not time-sensitive. Attentive observers will note indications of the film's war-time production, such as ration stamps, period dialogue, pictures of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a woman taxi driver who says to Bogart: "I'm your girl".
At war's end, the "Bogie and Bacall" phenomenon, begun with To Have and Have Not and their marriage, was in full swing and Bacall's agent asked that portions of the film be re-shot to capitalize on her new celebrity. Producer Jack Warner agreed, and new scenes were added, such as the sexually suggestive race horse dialogue scene. The re-shot ending featured Peggy Knudsen as "Mona Mars" because Pat Clark, the originally-cast actress, was unavailable. Consequently, because of the two versions created by the re-shooting, there is a substantial content difference of some twenty minutes between them, although the running time difference between the two versions is two minutes. The re-shot, revised version of The Big Sleep was released on 23 August 1946.
The cinematic release of The Big Sleep is regarded as more successful than the pre-release version (see below), although it is confusing and difficult to follow. For example, it omits a long conversation between Marlowe and the Los Angeles District Attorney where facts of the case, thus far, are exposited. Yet movie star aficionados prefer it to the film noir version because they consider the Bogart-Bacall appearances more important than a well-told story. For an example of this point of view, see Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" essay on the film.[1]
[edit] Production
Novelist Raymond Chandler said Martha Vickers (Carmen) overshadowed Lauren Bacall (Vivian) in their scenes together. Unfortunately, that led the producers to delete much of Vickers' performance to enhance Bacall's.[4]
Although Martha Vickers plays Lauren Bacall's younger sister, she is only eight months her junior.
It's been suggested that the henchmen Sidney and Pete were named in tribute to Bogart's frequent co-stars Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.
The Big Sleep was made in the age of Hays Office censorship, when it was expected that adults would understand certain story points that would be lost to children. In the novel, the books Geiger profitably rents are pornography, then illegal and associated with organized crime. The photograph of Carmen wearing a "Chinese dress" and sitting in a "Chinese chair" alludes to that.
In the film, Joe Brody is killed by Carol Lundgren who believes he killed Geiger. In the novel, Lundgren is Geiger's homosexual lover, a detail which goes unmentioned in the film.
In the novel, Marlowe finds pornographic photographs of Carmen and later finds her naked in his bed. In the film, the photographs show Carmen was at Geiger's house when he was killed (thus possibly implicating her in his murder). The novel's nude bedroom scene in Marlowe's apartment is altered in the film to a clothed Carmen awaiting him in an armchair.
The authorised DVD is a double-sided, single-layer disc; the 1945 film noir version is in side-A, the 1946 movie star version is in side-B.
The Big Sleep is now in the public domain because the copyright has expired.
[edit] Cast
- Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe
- Lauren Bacall as Vivian Sternwood Rutledge
- 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
- Charles Waldron as General Sternwood
- Charles D. Brown as Norris, Sternwood's butler
- Bob Steele as Lash Canino
- Elisha Cook Jr. as Harry Jones
- Louis Jean Heydt as Joe Brody
- Sonia Darrin as Agnes Lowzier, the salesgirl at A.J. Geiger bookstore (uncredited)
- Ben Welden as Pete, Mars' flunky (uncredited)
- Tom Fadden as Sidney, Mars' flunky (uncredited)
- Trevor Bardette as Art Huck (uncredited)
- Theodore von Eltz as Arthur Gwynn Geiger (uncredited)
[edit] Reception
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.
[edit] Awards
- Library of Congress (1997) U.S. National Film Registry.
- In 2003, AFI named the character Philip Marlowe the 32nd greatest hero in film.
[edit] Re-release
In the late 1990s, a pre-release version — director Hawks's original cut — was found in the UCLA Film and Television Archive. That version was released to the military to play to troops in the South Pacific. Benefactors, led by businessman Hugh Hefner, raised the money to pay for its restoration, and the original version of The Big Sleep was released in art house cinemas for a short exhibition run, along with a comparative documentary about the cinematic and content differences between Hawks' film noir and the Warner Brothers "movie star" version. In 2000, a DVD was released with both versions and a briefer, edited version of the comparative documentary.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Complete summary of The Big Sleep (1946). Eskimo.com (2003). Retrieved on 2008-06-07.
- ^ Overview for The Big Sleep (1946). Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved on 2008-06-07.
- ^ Hiney, T. and MacShane, F. "The Raymond Chandler Papers", Letter to Jamie Hamilton, 21 March 1949, page 105, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000
- ^ Hiney, T. and MacShane, F. "The Raymond Chandler Papers", Letter to Jamie Hamilton, 30 May 1946, page 67, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000
[edit] External links
- The Big Sleep at the Internet Movie Database
- The Big Sleep at the TCM Movie Database
- Roger Ebert's Review
- skyjude - movie legends
- The Big Sleep movie posters at MoviePosterDB.com
- Synopsis at reelclassics.com
- Synopsis at filmsite.org
- Literature on The Big Sleep
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