The Big Sleep

 

I was
sitting at a light, and the guy in front of me had a “Dude Abides” bumper
sticker, and having just watched The Big
Lebowski not long before, I couldn’t help thinking that the Dude doesn’t , really.  All due respect to Jeff Bridges – who’s
terrific in pretty much everything he does, Hell and High Water only the most
recent example – Lebowski dates
really badly.  On the other hand, Miller’s Crossing seems timeless.  This is to take two examples from the Coen oeuvre . 
Robert Towne.  Tequila Sunrise , from 1988, is stuck
there; Chinatown ,
released in ‘74, has no such issue.  Why
is Altman’s The Long Goodbye , Chandler updated to the contemporary L.A.
of 1973, left behind, but the Chandler
of The Big Sleep (1945) as present
and real as a dime?

You
could say that Miller’s Crossing and Chinatown are
intentional period pieces, yes, and that Tequila
Sunrise and 1973’s Long Goodbye
are trying intentionally to be timely, but we should remember that The Big Sleep , in 1945, was in fact
contemporary.   Take a look at the Woody
Van Dyke much-celebrated adaption of Hammett’s The Thin Man , in 1934, Powell
and Myrna Loy.   The leads are terrific,
the dialogue snappy, the runtime comes in at an hour and a half, but you’re
still completely aware that you’re watching a picture from 1934.   Not nearly as true of John Huston’s adaption,
in 1941, of Hammett’s Maltese Falcon ,
which still reads as immediate.   But so
does Casablanca , in my opinion.   Maybe the difference is Bogart.

Bogart
went from second leads to movie star with High
Sierra , in 1940 (even if he’s actually billed second, after Ida
Lupino).  He did Falcon in ‘41, and Casablanca in
‘42. He
worked with Hawks for the first time – and famously, met Bacall – in To Have and Have Not , in 1944.  Bogart and Bacall fell in love while they
were making the picture, you can see
it happening.  The Big Sleep was the second movie they made together; it wrapped
in early ‘45, but released a year later. 
Thereby lies a tale.

The
first cut of the picture has more Martha Vickers (the little sister), and less
Bacall.  Hawks went back and shot extra
scenes, and recut the movie.  Vickers got
less screen time, Bacall got more, by about twenty minutes.  It made Bacall’s career, and Martha Vickers
never got another part as good, to make it up to her.  The plot actually makes less sense, in the
re-edited version; Carmen, the baby sister, turns out in the book to have
murdered Sean Regan (spoiler alert), but they had to change the ending for the
movie, so the whole thing doesn’t hang together.  None of this matters.  The picture is dreamlike: Hawks later remarked
that the audience reaction made him realize that if you kept things moving fast
enough, nobody cared whether any of
it made sense.  This isn’t quite
true.  The plot almost comes together.  You
paper over the holes because of your giddy pleasure in its exhilarating surface
tension.

My point
about The Big Sleep being contemporary
to its own era is that an audience back then
would recognize both specific detail and things left unspoken.   They’d notice, for example, the gas ration
stickers on Marlowe’s windshield – the war was only just over.   They’d realize that when Dorothy Malone pulls
the shades and pours Marlowe a drink, there’s more on offer than just what’s in
the glass.   They’d know what the cop,
Bernie Ohls, was on about when he says about Sean Regan, “Oh, you mean the
ex-legger Gen.
Sternwood hired to do his drinking for him?”  
(They weren’t that far removed from Prohibition, and Repeal.)   They could figure out what kind of books
Geiger was selling, in brown paper wrappers, and why Carmen was vulnerable to
blackmail, and what the relationship was between Geiger and Carol Lundgren, the
kid who cleans up after the murder, and dresses the dead man in his Chinese pyjamas,
and lays him out on the bed.   None of it
had to be spelled out.

There’s
also the still-shocking violence.   The
death of Elisha Cook.   The moment in the
garage, Canino flipping the roll of coins in his hand, Marlowe taken by
surprise, his arms pinned to his sides with the spare tire, and Canino with the
sucker punch, straight to the jaw – Canino opens his balled fist, and the loose
coins spill out.   And the killing of
Canino himself, as cold-blooded as anybody could get away with, at the
time.  

The
test, I think, is whether we recognize their attitudes as like ours, their choices, their motives, their reactions,
not so much the fashions in clothes, as their manner.   Do they feel genuine to us?   I think Marlowe does.   I’m not a big fan of Chandler ’s down-these-mean-streets
prescription, but if anybody can live up to it, Bogart certainly can.   And he does it without being performative , or self-conscious – it’s
natural and lived-in, someone he’s familiar with.

Bacall,
too, is a very assured presence.   You get
the feeling that the characters, as thin as the script is, have a sense of
their own back story, and don’t need to fill it in for us.   Hawks, knowing he’s onto a good thing, gives
her the last word.   Bogart is finishing up
the story,  what’s
happened and what has to happen next, and Bacall tells him he’s forgotten one
thing: her.   What’s wrong with you? he
asks her.   “Nothing you can’t fix,” she
says.