Bogart and Bacall’s noir classic still dazzles

The suc­cess of To Have And Have Not, a film by Howard Hawks released in 1944 that intro­duced the sul­try pair­ing of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, led to a reunit­ing of those three in the 1946 film noir clas­sic The Big Sleep. The film was adapt­ed from the 1939 nov­el of the same name writ­ten by Raymond Chandler. The nov­el intro­duced us to the wise-crack­ing, hard-drink­ing Los Angeles pri­vate eye Phillip Marlowe. He was brought to the sil­ver screen by Humphrey Bogart. 

The screen­play was writ­ten by three writ­ers, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman and Nobel-prize win­ning author William Faulkner. Howard Hawks joined in at times with some re-writes of scenes. Faulkner had also been involved in writ­ing the screen­play for To Have and Have Not. 

The sto­ry opens with Phillip Marlowe appear­ing at the man­sion of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) who engages Marlowe to resolve a prob­lem of debts his youngest daugh­ter, Carmen (Martha Vickers), owes to a book­seller named Arthur Geiger. As he is leav­ing the man­sion Marlowe is stopped by the Colonel’s old­est daugh­ter, Vivian (Lauren Bacall), who tells him that she thinks the real rea­son her father want­ed to hire Marlowe was to find his pro­tégé, Sean Regan, who has been miss­ing for a month. 

Marlowe finds Geiger’s shop and fol­lows Geiger back to his home. He hears a gun­shot and a woman scream­ing and breaks in to find Geiger dead and Carmen drugged. He takes Carmen back to her home and upon return­ing to Geiger’s home finds the body is miss­ing. The mys­tery builds as Marlowe learns that the Colonel’s dri­ver, Owen Taylor, has been found dead from a blow to the head and the car was dri­ven off a pier. 

The fol­low­ing morn­ing Marlowe is vis­it­ed in his office by Vivian who shares that she has received scan­dalous pho­tos of her sis­ter with a demand for mon­ey to get the neg­a­tives. We are then intro­duced to mul­ti­ple shady char­ac­ters includ­ing Joe Brody, a gam­bler who has pre­vi­ous­ly black­mailed the Colonel, Carol Lundgren, Geiger’s dri­ver who is con­vinced that Brody was swin­dling Geiger, and Eddie Mars, gang­ster and own­er of a casi­no fre­quent­ed by Vivian. 

The plot becomes even more com­pli­cat­ed and Carmen’s errat­ic behav­ior leads Marlowe to believe that she needs psy­chi­atric care. Also, the rela­tion­ship between Marlowe and Vivian inten­si­fies. As usu­al, no spoil­ers here but there are many twists and turns in this story. 

There are many char­ac­ters in this sto­ry, and some famil­iar faces may stand out to you fans of these old­er movies. Dorothy Malone appears as the pro­pri­etress of the Acme Bookstore, Regis Toomey is Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls, and Elisha Cook Jr. is Harry Jones. Fans of the old Westerns should rec­og­nize Bob Steele as Lash Canino. 

The plot for The Big Sleep is very com­pli­cat­ed and was made even more so by the con­stant changes and re-writes dur­ing the film­ing. Some of these changes were made nec­es­sary at the insis­tence of the cen­sors with the Hays Office to tone down the sex­u­al ref­er­ences in the sto­ry. Carmen was depict­ed as being very sex­u­al in her behav­ior, and the steamy scenes with Bogart and Bacall raised some concerns. 

Howard Hawks began film­ing in October, 1944 and planned to have it com­plet­ed by November. However, as is not unusu­al, things did not go as planned. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had been engaged in an affair dur­ing the film­ing of To Have and Have Not and, need­less to say, this cre­at­ed dif­fi­cul­ties in his mar­riage. He had decid­ed to attempt to work things out in his mar­riage but that was not so easy. He and his wife, Mayo Methot, had a very dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ship and those dif­fi­cul­ties led to Bogart’s increased drink­ing. He missed a num­ber of days film­ing and the project was delayed. Reportedly, on the very first day of film­ing Bogart had five or six drinks at lunch and Howard Hawks was irate. He laid into Bogart and after that Bogart was lim­it­ed to one beer at lunch. 

Hawks had anoth­er con­cern with Bogart and that was his rela­tion­ship with Lauren Bacall. He report­ed­ly did not approve of their rela­tion­ship and told Bacall she need­ed to stay away from Bogart. Hawks and his wife tried to intro­duce her to oth­ers, includ­ing Clark Gable. Interestingly, Hawks end­ed up adding scenes to the film that high­light­ed the rela­tion­ship between the char­ac­ters Marlowe and Vivian. 

The film was com­plet­ed in January, 1945 and ini­tial­ly shown to American ser­vice­men over­seas. It was not yet released in the United States, as Warner Bros. opt­ed to release their war-themed movies. One of those films, Confidential Agent (1945), starred Lauren Bacall. It did not do well at the box-office and the stu­dio was con­cerned about the impact the fail­ure would have on their per­ceived star Bacall. 

Along with that, audi­ences that had seen the ear­ly release of The Big Sleep com­plained that there were not enough scenes fea­tur­ing Bogart and Bacall. In January 1946 addi­tion­al scenes were filmed that focused on the Bogart-Bacall rela­tion­ship and replaced scenes in the pre­vi­ous release (of which a num­ber focused on scenes with Martha Vickers). 

The final ver­sion was released in 1946 and became one of the biggest hits of the year for the stu­dio. It also marked the sev­enth film in a row that was a big hit for Howard Hawks. 

Though a big hit with audi­ences, not all crit­ics were so high on the film. Film crit­ic Bosley Crowther com­plained: “The Big Sleep is one of those pic­tures in which so many cryp­tic things occur amid so much involved and devi­ous plot­ting that the mind becomes con­fused. . . . What with two inter­lock­ing mys­ter­ies and a great many char­ac­ters involved, the com­plex of black­mail and mur­der soon becomes a web of utter baf­fle­ment.” He also crit­i­cized Lauren Bacall describ­ing her as a “dan­ger­ous look­ing female . . . who still hasn’t learned to act.” 

However, oth­er crit­ics found more pos­i­tive things to say. The crit­ic for the mag­a­zine Time described the film as “wake­ful fare for folks who don’t care what is going on, or why, so long as the talk is hard and the action hard­er.” He also stat­ed that “the plot’s crazi­ly mys­ti­fy­ing, night­mare blur is an asset, and only one of many.” 

In a review writ­ten in 1991 Pauline Kael described the film as a “ . . . wit­ty, incred­i­bly com­pli­cat­ed thriller . . . it’s the dia­logue and the enter­tain­ing qual­i­ties of the indi­vid­ual sequences that make this movie.” In his 1997 review crit­ic Roger Ebert stat­ed “ . . . it is one of the great films noir, a black-and-white sym­pho­ny that exact­ly repro­duces Chandler’s abil­i­ty, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its dis­tance, and yet is wry and humor­ous and cares.” 

Ebert went on to praise Humphrey Bogart: “Bogart him­self made per­son­al style into an art form. What else did he have? He wasn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly hand­some, he wore a rug, he wasn’t tall, and he always seemed to act with­in a cer­tain range. Yet no oth­er movie actor is more like­ly to be remem­bered a cen­tu­ry from now. And the fas­ci­nat­ing sub­text in The Big Sleep is that in Bacall he found his match.” 

Prior to the release in the­aters of the film, Bogart and Bacall did indeed become a match.  Bogart’s trou­bled mar­riage was behind him and on May 21, 1945, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall mar­ried.  They remained mar­ried until his death in 1957. 

In 1997 The Big Sleep was vot­ed into the National Film Registry. In 1998 the American Film Institute includ­ed it in the list of movies nom­i­nat­ed for the “Top 100 Greatest American Movies.” Roger Ebert includ­ed it on his list of “Great Movies” and Steven Schneider lists it in his “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.” 

A remake of The Big Sleep was made in 1978 with a more con­tem­po­rary set­ting in England and had an out­stand­ing cast. Robert Mitchum starred as Phillip Marlowe, James Stewart as Colonel Sternwood and Sarah Miles as Charlotte (Vivian in the orig­i­nal). Other actors includ­ed Joan Collins, Richard Boone and Oliver Reed. However, the remake was not very well received. 

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) rates The Big Sleep at 7.9 of 10. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a Critics Score of 96% and an Audience Score of 91%. In search­ing my Roku device I could find no free stream­ing sites, but there is a copy of the DVD on the shelf at the Clark County Public Library. 

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made a total of four films togeth­er — To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948). To quote Peter Bradshaw, film crit­ic with Guardian: “No screen cou­ple, before or since, had as much chem­istry as Bogart and Bacall.” Reel Classics has reviewed three of those four. As I am a huge Bogart and Bacall fan, have no fear that the fourth film yet to be reviewed, Dark Passage, will at some point in the future appear here. 

Information for this Reel Classic review was gath­ered from sources includ­ing the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Rotten Tomatoes, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and Wikipedia.