#22: the big sleep (howard hawks, 1946)

(This is the 29th of 50 pieces that originally appeared in a Facebook group devoted to three of us choosing our 50 favorite movies. I’ll present them un-edited except for typos or egregious errors. I’ll also add a post-script to each.)

This is the second Hawks film on my list, and it won’t be the last. I feel pretty close to the source material … Raymond Chandler took up an entire chapter of my dissertation … but of all the Hawks movies I’m including on this list, The Big Sleep is the most lacking in the things I like best about Hawks. There is banter, often hilarious, but it tends to be between two people (most often Bogart and Bacall) rather than between a group of cronies. And Bacall’s Vivian Rutledge brings a little something to the table (mostly Lauren Bacall, which in the mid-40s was plenty), but compared to someone like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, Mrs. Rutledge is pretty tame.

But the combination of elements raises The Big Sleep such that I might complain lightly about this or that, but there is too much to enjoy for those complaints to matter. There’s Bogart, who makes his first-but-not-last appearance on my list (and at least two others of his films almost made the cut). There’s Chandler … I knew I was going to work one of his novels into the list, and while The Long Goodbye is a more interesting subject for discussion, I’ve already written a lot about that movie. There’s Hawks, who is all over my list. There’s the relationship between Bogie and Baby. There are those goofy moments when the picture just stops so the two lovebirds can dish up supreme dialogue.

The Big Sleep is another film that was altered prior to its release. This time, though, the changes were made with the director and actors part of the process. Mostly, Bacall’s role was changed to give her a personality more like the one in To Have and Have Not that was popular with audiences. One problem with the editing and rearranging and additional scenes is that chunks of the original were eliminated. The new version played up Bogie and Baby; a lot of what was cut was expository. The plot of The Big Sleep is hard enough to follow in the first place. Eliminate scenes that help guide the audience through the labyrinth and you’ve only made matters worse.

All of this ended up revealing something of a secret. Audiences may not have understood who killed whom, but they loved Bogart and Bacall, together again, trading quips. In some ways, every mystery film with a senseless, too-complicated plot that tries to charm its way past the audience is in debt to The Big Sleep, which proved if you got everything else right, no one cared who killed the chauffeur.

 

There was a handful of comments, all positive, with one person admitting he had a thing for Dorothy Malone.

Comments

[Tomás]

I recently heard a story that the writers and Hawks struggled with the script while filming. After trying to work on it, they finally went to Chandler himself to ask for clarification about who killed who or why or soemthing. He couldn't figure it out either.