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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