Movies - The Big Sleep

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	Movies - The Big Sleep

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 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.

Plot

The Big Sleep features one of the most convoluted plots in cinema history. The narrative is even harder to follow given that the film leaves several elements of the story undeveloped. The various plot strands are rather precariously held together within the film’s gossamer structure.

The story begins when Philip Marlowe visits his new client, General Sternwood, presumably to take care of some gambling debts left by his youngest daughter Carmen to a bookseller named Geiger. The oldest daughter, Vivian, suspects that her father is more concerned with finding out what happened to his employee Sean Regan, who had mysteriously disappeared about a month prior.

Shortly after Marlowe begins to investigate, he finds Geiger shot dead in his home, with an unidentified man fleeing the scene and Carmen inside the house, high on drugs. Marlowe finds a camera in the house with the film missing. We soon find out that a man named Joe Brody possesses the film and is attempting to extort the Sternwoods to prevent him from using the film to implicate Carmen in the murder.

In a later scene, we find out that it was not Brody, but General Sternwood’s chauffeur, Owen Taylor, who shot Geiger. Brody merely found Taylor, clubbed him, and took the film. Brody left Taylor unconscious in the car, which was later mysteriously driven off the pier, leading to Taylor's watery death. Incidentally, this is the plot point that left the director, the screenwriters, and even Raymond Chandler himself baffled. None of them could figure out who killed Taylor. The film likewise does not develop the details surrounding Geiger’s murder, nor the later murder of Joe Brody by Geiger’s shadow, Carol Lundgren (presumably, among other reasons, because Carol Lundgren is a man and he was Geiger's homosexual partner - not something the Hollywood censors would have permitted in 1946). The story soon shifts to focus on the mystery at the heart of the film: the whereabouts of Sean Regan.

Eddie Mars owns the house that Geiger lived in, and also owns a gambling establishment frequented by Vivian. Marlowe first met Mars while he was investigating the Geiger murder, which had also taken Mars by surprise. The two offered each other their help if needed. However, Mars becomes decidedly less friendly when Marlowe asks about Sean Regan, who had presumably run off with Mars’ wife. Vivian too is anxious for Marlowe to close the case after the resolution of the Geiger matter, and to stop him from inquiring about Sean Regan. Marlowe is curious why Mars isn’t more worried about finding his wife, and why so many people are determined to stop him from finding Sean Regan.

It is later revealed, at least implicitly, that Eddie 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 ran off with him. Mars presumes that this will keep the cops from becoming suspicious that he himself killed Regan. Marlowe eventually convinces Vivian to help him instead of Mars, and the two of them figure out that it was Mars who killed Sean Regan after all. Mars then dies of friendly fire by his own men in a final shootout at the Geiger house.

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 the character of chauffeur Owen Taylor. They sent a cable to the author, who replied saying "I'm damned if I know!"

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 lessened after its conclusion, whereas The Big Sleep had no such obvious issues of time sensitivity which would require 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 Delano Roosevelt.)

Once the war ended, and Warner Bros. planned to release The Big Sleep, the "Bogie & Bacall" phenomenon caused by their electric appearance in 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 now in the part of Mona Mars, owing to the original actress, Pat Clark, being 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. This resulted in a great deal of confusion being artificially imposed on what was an already intricate plot. In its revised form, The Big Sleep made its theatrical debut on 23 August 1946.

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