The Big Sleep (1946)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, Raymond Chandler
Photography: Sidney Hickox
Music: Max Steiner
Editor: Christian Nyby
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, John Ridgely, Dorothy Malone, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Charles D. Brown, Elisha Cook Jr., Louis Jean Heydt, Bob Steele, Peggy Knudsen, Sonia Darrin, Joy Barlow, Tommy Rafferty

In my period of infatuation with Humphrey Bogart, late teens or so, The Big Sleep always gave me a bad case of cognitive dissonance. I could see that Bogart's turn at the Philip Marlowe private detective created by Raymond Chandler belongs with his best, his best being Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, probably The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, probably High Sierra, and maybe The African Queen (still too young for In a Lonely Place, which was not even in my sights). The Big Sleep also benefits from palpable chemistry between Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Rutledge, the quasi-femme fatale and romantic interest. Bogart and Bacall were single when the picture started shooting but married to each other for the rest of their lives by the time it came out. They had been good in director Howard Hawks's 1944 cover of Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, which was Bacall's first picture. They were even better here.

But The Big Sleep so completely confounds clarity that I resented it, even if Bogart was in every damn scene. The fact that no one, including Chandler, could say who committed one of its murders outraged me. Not that I was noticing specific plot holes—I wasn't even sure I was tracking basic through-lines half the time, especially with new characters still arriving even into the last third. Also, it never helped that anyone discussing the picture always cheerfully mentioned its incomprehensibility. The point of the mystery genre is to create narratives that are not a mystery any longer at the end, I insisted. The Big Sleep was breaking these rules and what was worse everyone seemed to admire that as much as anything else about it.



I'm older and wiser than that now, of course. Yet the last time I looked I could not resist one more attempt to make it all connect and work. It must hang together somehow, right? It's a freaking mainstream commercial Hollywood picture from the '40s. Some of my notes from that day may indicate how it went: "First body—Geiger.... Second body—Owen Taylor, Sternwood's chauffeur. This is the murder that is never solved and no one notices, like getting a base on balls with three pitches thrown.... Taylor was in love with Carmen. He took the car without permission.... Shawn Regan ran off with Eddie Mars's wife. Marlowe keeps asking everyone about Regan.... Joe Brody shot Geiger?... Owen killed Geiger and took the film. Brody went after him to get the film.... Third body—Brody, answering his door. Shot by a man I don't think we know yet. It's Carol, whose name was mentioned earlier.... Eddie Mars was Geiger's landlord.... Now Marlowe is talking about someone tailing him in a gray Plymouth coupe.... Owen Taylor killed Geiger?... Shawn Regan has been found in Mexico. He is injured, or something.... Puss Walgreen's office. Who is Puss Walgreen?... Fourth body—Harry Jones, the one tailing Marlowe.... Going to Art Huck's, 10 miles east of Realito.... Fifth body—Canino, shot by Marlowe.... Carmen killed Regan?"

Well, enough of that. Once again I could not make it add up. It is as if truth and reality themselves are the MacGuffins in this sophisticated alluring tapestry created by Hawks and a team of four writers (counting Chandler, who wrote the original short story, "Killer in the Rain"). They were dodging around the concerns of censors too, which could not have helped. I've been having some fun lately with movies from 1946, identifying the alarming drunks. This time I suspect it's Hawks and his merry band, which includes William Faulkner, though there's little here that feels Faulknerian. But many of these scenes are more like inspired party revels, all fast-paced zingers and witty ripostes and flirty banter, not quite up to the level of Casablanca but in the vicinity. Note that the cast list above is big for a movie under two hours, another indication of what these filmmakers are up to, not only bringing in more plot wrinkles but bringing in more character actors too. At some point it starts to feel a little like the Lost TV show, which never found a complication it couldn't respond to with more complications. Or maybe even Casablanca itself, except they never find a way to pull it together.

Yet the style and mood of The Big Sleep are very nearly perfect—I never could deny the thrill of the way it starts, with those silhouettes and beautiful fancy titles, moving briskly through its early scenes just like an actual mystery story, nimbly identifying areas of intrigue and cross-motivations across characters as an investigation begins, implying a promise of resolution by all the familiar tokens. But you have to let go of that, I'd say by about 40 minutes in, and embrace it more as a mood piece, one that is projecting a uniquely American confidence. It's a classic Bogart role because he is playing his classic American everyman—not tall, not handsome, verging on jowly slob. He might smell bad. Yet he always remains supremely confident. One of the first things that happens in The Big Sleep is a beautiful woman pointing out to Marlowe that he's short. He couldn't care less—later he says of the encounter, "She tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up." Bogart is one of the best Marlowes (just like he's one of the best Sam Spades and probably would have been one of the best Lew Archers) because he is so flawed by conventional standards. All he has is guts and that's all he needs to get by in a world that makes no sense at all—literally, no sense at all. Most of The Big Sleep was actually filmed in 1944, when the tide of World War II was turning in the favor of the Allies, but still hardly certain. So there is no triumphalism here, only confidence, walking the tightrope of nerve.

The Big Sleep thus operates on the humming vibration of a higher zen plane. It is not possible to understand. It will never be possible to understand. If understanding seems within reach that is the illusory nature of reality. Understanding can never be attained. Look at The Big Sleep and begin again to learn these simple lessons. It's practically an existential art film—with a happy ending.