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Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) is hired by an imposing hoodlum (Mike Mazurki) to find his missing lover.
While on the hunt for this woman, Marlowe is drawn into the orbit of a wealthy family with an interest in keeping Marlowe from finding his quarry…
Following The Big Sleep, I was on a Marlowe kick.
I had heard good things about this film, and after The Big Sleep, I was keen to get a different (and hopefully more straightforward) take on the shamus.
I also had a history with star Dick Powell.
As a child I had a collection of cassette tapes of old detective radio shows from the Forties.
Two of those shows, Richard Diamond and Rogues Gallery, starred Powell. I gravitated toward Richard Diamond because of the humor, but Powell radiated a charisma and charm that made me return to those episodes over the others.
I had no knowledge of Powell’s screen work, or of his early screen persona as a musical comedy star.
That context is crucial because this film was Powell’s attempt to change his screen image. It succeeded so much that he would thereafter become a leading man of noir.
Visually, this movie is what people think of with classic film noir: lots of extreme angles and chiaroscuro.
The film opens on a dramatic overhead shot of an interrogation room, where a blindfolded Marlowe is surrounded by police officers. It is a mission statement that the film continues to pay off, using the influence of German expressionism to develop a visual language for Raymond Chandler’s evocative prose.
Take Moose’s introduction, in which he looms out of the darkness as a reflection in Marlowe’s office window. It is a foreboding opening that turns him from a simple leg-breaker into a force of nature.
One of the most effective sequences in the film is literal nightmare, in which Marlowe imagines himself running through multiple doors while being chased by a man with a hypodermic needle.
As with the Bogart version, I had to re-watch the movie to pay attention to the plot - it is longwinded, but it at least resolves.
With The Big Sleep, the attraction is the interplay between the characters. The repartee is not as unique as the Hawks film, but it is still effective - and Powell is great.
I will not say his performance is as iconic as Bogart - and as far as star charisma goes, Powell is no Bogie.
But that is no deficit here.
Whereas Bogart seems effortless and always thinking on his feet, Powell seems more human and fallible.
While smart, Powell’s Marlowe is far less confident, and is shown to be more vulnerable. He gets tortured and appears to be genuinely traumatised by the experience.
His Marlowe also has an air of economic precariousness which adds to that lack of confidence - he does not seem to have a choice to turn down Moose when the giant appears in his office.
Like all good comic performers, Powell underplays the dramatic scenes. And his comic touch works as the exasperated release of a man in over his head.
He gets a lot of lovely bits of business - his brief dance as he wanders through the cavernous mansion; lighting a cigarette on a Cupid statue; aping Moose’s monosyllabic voice.
Powell’s Marlowe may go through hell in this movie, but he seems to take joy wherever he can get it.
While he is not in the movie for long, I was struck by the emotional impact of Moose’s love for Velma.
It is rare to see a stooge take such a central role, particularly as a client, and it gave the movie a unique pathos and tension.
Played by professional wrestler Mike Mazurki, he is slightly wooden, but in a way that works. The character appears to be slightly punch drunk, and prone to sudden shifts in temper.
There is something terrifyingly pathetic about him. He is a more violent spiritual sibling to Laird Cregar’s similarly obsessive policeman in I Wake Up Screaming.
The finale is an overstuffed series of monologues as the plot is finally explained, but it is made up for by the quiet farce of the final scene: Marlowe, temporarily blinded, is unaware his love interest is in the room as he rhapsodises about how she saved his life.
It is a relatively light-hearted close, but it marks a suitable redemption for our put-upon hero - blundering forward into the unknown with his heart on his sleeve.
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Gondō (Toshiro Mifune) is a wealthy executive in the middle of a scheme to take over the company he works for.
As the deal hangs in the balance, Gondō is sent a mysterious demand: kidnappers are holding his son for ransom.
Gondō is willing to do anything to save his son - until he realises the kidnappers have mistaken his chauffeur’s son for his and are holding the wrong child.
Gondō is forced to confront a greater obstacle than the kidnappers’ deadline: his own willingness to weigh an innocent life against his own material gain…
Based on a novel by Evan Hunter, High and Low is a study in class, and how that influences society’s sense of crime.
It was a bit of a shock to see Toshiro Mifune in this setting. Not the contemporary dress, but the style - Gondō is a stuffed shirt, a square.
We meet him at the height of his power - he is attempting a hostile takeover of his company by buying out other shareholders.
This is also built on hubris.
Gondō is at his most vulnerable: He has had to mortgage everything he owns in order to pull off this gambit.
Most of the opening act is set in Mr Gondō’s living room - an open air space that goes from an embodiment of his status as a king of industry, to a glass cage, once it becomes clear the home is under surveillance.
We get a lot of the signifiers that would go onto become conventions of later kidnapping thrillers:
The team of cops (arriving disguised as a cleaning crew) who educate Gondō on the psychology of the kidnapper
the attempt to trace the kidnappers’ phone call
the ransom drop in a public location
The film even foregrounds the use of recording technology to try and work out the kidnappers’ identity (the in-film camera recording from the train of the kidnappers approaching the drop site).
While these elements are interesting, the real power of the film is the psychological and moral conflict within Gondō as he weighs the life of his chauffeur’s child.
This is where the film’s use of mise-en-scene comes in, in terms of conveying the disparities of economics and power between Gondō and everyone else.
The main character’s white home is on a hill, surrounded on all sides by poorer neighbourhoods.
We get a glimpse of the kidnapper in his own home, a claustrophobic room with an unobstructed view of Mr Gondō’s house.
Kurosawa frames his POV with other buildings to increase the contrast with open space and panoramic view his enemy has.
As the film progresses, the narrative POV shifts from Gondō to the police as they track down the kidnapper. In a particularly impressive scene, we follow the police as they tail the kidnapper (Tatsuya Nakadai) as he himself follows an oblivious Gondō down a busy street.
When the kidnapper is finally caught, he is revealed as engaging in his own twisted power fantasies, using what position and tools he has to manipulate and abuse.
Ironically, the kidnapper’s success over Gondō ends up restoring his victim - he has lost his money, but with it, he regains his sense of self.
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Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) takes on a case. He makes eyes at his client’s mysterious daughter (Lauren Bacall). People die. Marlowe wisecracks.
I have no idea what is going on.
This is one of those iconic movies I cannot crack.
As I have been slowly making my way through Humphrey Bogart’s filmography, I dreaded going back to The Big Sleep.
I have watched it before, but I do not count it because it was on a plane. I could not remember a thing from that viewing.
While that experience is a wash, this is sadly par for the course with myself and Philip Marlowe.
I have tried reading Raymond Chandler’s books in the past, but always get tripped up. I think I only managed to finish one of his books. His language is fantastic, but only effective in moments.
In terms of the classic crime pantheon, I leaned more toward Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain.
The one piece of Marlowe that I enjoyed was an audio cassette featuring a couple episodes of the radio show from the Forties, starring Gerald Mohr.
Going into this rewatch, I knew that the plot is famously nonsensical (the film was famously re-worked to foreground Bogie and Bacall’s chemistry, which meant the labyrinth plot was cut down).
That knowledge helped somewhat.
I could spend more time enjoying Bogart’s sardonic, contrarian turn, and Bacall’s smoulder. The couple famously wed between the original production and the reshoots, and their chemistry should be billed as the third lead.
Their dynamic - fraught with sexual tension and paranoia, is the calm centre of the jumbled plotting.
With the focus on the relationship between Marlowe and his former client/love interest, the film has an emotional centre separate from the convoluted mystery.
The Big Sleep is a great example of a star vehicle.
In the decades before IP came to dominate Hollywood, stars like Bogart could draw audiences based on their defined persona.
Hence one could watch Bogart play variations of Casablanca in films like Tokyo Joe and Sirocco.
While the lead of The Big Sleep is named Marlowe, one could treat the film as a spiritual successor to the star’s turn as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.
The film is filled with great comic business - the scene of Marlow pretending to be a pretentious book collector; the recurring gag of Marlow collecting guns from everyone he runs into.
Marlowe’s womanising is a gag itself.
Unable to show anything more explicit, the film has Marlowe run into a series of women (including Dorothy Malone) who immediately show an interest in him (Watching the scene with Malone’s attractive shopkeeper, I had a moment of deja vu - it is because it is replayed with no Hays Code-era restrictions by Burt Reynolds in 1972’s Shamus, which I reviewed last year).
The plot does become a bit of a problem by the end.
It is not just that I could not follow what was happening, it was that I could not track why it was important.
Best viewed as a vehicle for Bogart and Bacall to verbally spar with each other, The Big Sleep is the prime example of why plot is ultimately less important than what the story is ultimately about.
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When his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) is murdered, detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is fingered as the prime suspect.
Spade’s first port of call is Miles’ last client, Bridgid O’Shaunessey (Mary Astor).
Spade quickly finds himself in the midst of a conspiracy based around a mysterious artefact.
Will Spade solve the mystery of Miles’ murder?
Back to Bogart, and another classic title I have never seen before.
I think I have avoided this movie because of how well-known it is.
What a joy.
This review is going to be brief - this movie is a bolt of pure entertainment. While it is largely based in sitting rooms, it is a testament to its pace and dynamism that The Maltese Falcon never drags.
Bogart holds the screen from the first second, but the scene which really showcases his star persona - tough, no-nonsense,whip-smart - is the first interrogation scene with the police at his home.
At once prickly and disarming, Bogart is a marvel. His closing crack asking the cops how he killed Thursby is the punchline on a tour-de-force of uncorked charisma.
This scene sums up the dynamics at play. Spade is the focus of other parties who will stop at nothing to get what they want.
What is miraculous about the movie is that while the stakes are clear, Bogart’s Spade is so cool under pressure, the question underpinning each predicament he is in, is how he will get out of this jam, rather than if.
Unlike the noir protagonists that would follow him, he seems immune to the charms of the femme fatale - it seems clear he does not believe O’Shaunessey, and is more concerned with working out why she is lying. There is some attraction underpinning their relationship, but unlike a lot of movie PIs, he is too cool-headed to let it influence him.
Fundamentally, what differentiates Bogart’s Spade from the verbose villains around him is that he does not like bullshit.
A sterling debut from writer-director John Huston, and one of Bogart’s best showcases.
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