The Big Sleep
Short description
The Big Sleep is a crime drama set in Los Angeles, where private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by the elderly General Sternwood. The general wants him to deal with someone blackmailing his younger daughter, Carmen. What begins as a supposedly simple extortion case soon becomes far more complicated: the blackmailer turns up dead, the bodies begin to accumulate, and Marlowe finds himself navigating corruption, gambling, deception and violence. Carmen's older sister, Vivian, keeps appearing at the centre of events, and her loyalties remain unclear as Marlowe tries to work out what is really going on.
Howard Hawks directed the film, the ninth of the nineteen he made, following To Have and Have Not and preceding Red River. The screenplay was written by Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner, with Hawks producing. Humphrey Bogart plays Marlowe opposite Lauren Bacall as Vivian Sternwood Rutledge. The cast also includes John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Louis Jean Heydt and Charles Waldron, among forty-eight credited performers.
Released in 1946, the film took about eleven million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.9 from roughly ninety-five thousand votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.6 from a much smaller number of votes. A critics' rating of 9 out of 10 from sixty-seven reviews places it above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The image of the main character in the film 'Blade Runner,' played by Harrison Ford, is based on Philip Marlowe as portrayed by Bogart.
- By the time the film was supposed to be completed, Hawks had shot less than half the script. Some delays were caused by Humphrey Bogart's family problems, but mostly they fell behind schedule due to constant script rewrites. When the studio announced Christmas vacation, Hawks and screenwriter Jules Furthman (1888-1966) shortened the script to finish the project as quickly as possible, cutting entire scenes. Filming was eventually completed 34 days late and with a budget overrun of only $15,000 (thanks to the fact that the equipment for the auxiliary shooting locations was, whenever possible, the cheapest available).
- After seeing Humphrey Bogart in John Huston's (1906-1987) crime melodrama "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), Leigh Brackett wrote her first detective story, which impressed Hawks so much that he instructed his secretary to contact "this – what's-her-name – Brackett" to "help" with the screenplay for "The Big Sleep."
- Howard Hawks and the screenwriters considered many endings for the film. In one, Carmen attempted to stage a suicide, but it turned out the gun was loaded with live ammunition, not blanks. In another, Carmen was supposed to confess everything and walk into a trap set by the criminals. Eventually, they preferred this version: Marlowe flips a coin to decide what to do, and based on that, allows Carmen to leave the house, after which she falls into a trap. When censors protested the depiction of what they considered excessive violence on screen, Hawks asked what ending they would suggest themselves. They came up with the idea that Marlowe should force the leader of the criminals out of the house, and then be shot by his own gang outside. Hawks liked the idea so much that he immediately offered to hire its authors as screenwriters.
- In the late 1990s, a pre-release version of the 1945 film was discovered at the Film and Television Archive of the University of California. Hugh M. Hefner organized fundraising for its restoration. In 1997, the pre-release version was shown in art house cinemas alongside a documentary comparing the original Hawks film and the reworked "star version." Although the overall length of the pre-release version is only two minutes longer, it contains approximately 20 minutes of excised material.
- While working on the script, William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett couldn't figure out from the novel who killed one of the characters. They called Chandler, he flared up, said everything was written in the novel, and hung up. Faulkner and Brackett shrugged and returned to work. A while later, Chandler called them, said he had reread the novel and also didn't understand who the killer was, and then told them to solve the problem themselves.
- Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) read the script and stated that many of his character's lines were too sophisticated for such a persona. The actor approached screenwriter Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) and asked her to rewrite the lines; she responded that those lines had been written by William Faulkner (1897-1962), but she eventually rewrote them anyway, making them tougher and 'cooler'.
- William Faulkner came to the film set in Hollywood to work on this film, but he didn't like it there and asked director Howard Hawks (1896-1977) if he could work "from home." Hawks agreed, assuming Faulkner would work in his Hollywood apartment, and only later learned that Faulkner had returned home to Mississippi.
- According to Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), Martha Vickers (1925-1971) played Carmen so powerfully that she completely overshadowed Lauren Bacall (1924-2014), but most of the scenes featuring Vickers' character were cut during editing.
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