Watching The Detectives: The Big Sleep(Dir. Howard Hawks, 1h56m, 1946)

The hardboiled detective novel is a curiously American beast; brought into being by the Depression, its cynical anti-heroes more realistic than before, often dealing with organised crime and an equally corrupt legal system in violent tales in which cynical detectives and femme fatales cross paths. By far the most famous writer in this genre remains Raymond Chandler, an Anglo-American former oil executive who turned to writing after the Wall Street Crash, with The Big Sleep, the first novel featuring Chandler's sleuth, Phillip Marlowe, adapted into a film in 1946, that we focus on today.

Noir cinema, for its part, is nothing more or less than the capturing of novels such as The Big Sleep, and the other great hit of the era, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (adapted into a film in 1941). These films are largely realistic and visually low-key, shot in black and white either by necessity, as the heyday of the genre coincided with the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, or stylistic choice; as many of the directors and crew that came to make these films were emigrees from Germany, such as Fritz Lang, whose German Expressionist style informs the dark shadows and stark lighting of much of the genre, or the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, such as director Boris Ingster and Hungarian actor Peter Lorre, often paired with American dictorial talents such as Howard Hawks and John Huston.

The Big Sleep is no exception to the trends of the genre. Beginning with stylish credits, so Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart, already a veteran of noir cinema, having found stardom in The Maltese Falcon, playing the other great noir protagonist, Sam Spade), is summoned to the house of wheelchair bound General Sternwood (Charles Waldron). Sternwood is being blackmailed for the behaviour of his younger daughter, Carmen (Martha Vickers), whose wild behaviour and gambling has made her prey to the criminal underworld. Sternwood's friend and protégé, Sean Regan has also gone missing; Marlowe is confronted by Sternwood's elder daughter, Vivian, and it is here that the film brings together one of its great partnerships in Bogart and Bacall.

Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe, arguably the definitive noir protagonist

From, here, Marlowe begins to investigate the case; the gambling debts are to be paid to a would-be book seller, Geiger, only for Marllowe to find Geiger dead and Carmen drugged, with an empty camera nearby; upon returning her home, the body of Geiger has vanishing, and the bodies-the red points, one of several elements that remind the viewer that this is during the Second World War-begin to pile up, with Sternwood's driver, Taylor also found dead. With the blackmail becoming more serious, with the photographs emerging, thus leading to Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt), who has previously blackmailed Sternwood, only for the gangster, Eddie Mars to become involved in the case, and from here, Marlowe finds himself entangled with vengeful gangsters, wild sisters and Los Angeles' seedy underbelly.

Much like Hound of the Baskervilles, The Big Sleep is a film dominated by its tone; for the noir, this is this mix of physical darkness-little of the film takes place in daylight, either lit by half light or artificial light, giving much of the film the nuanced shadows now synonymous with the period, accompanied by the stirring strings and horns of Max Steiner's score, This is a genre in which murder and violence are rife. The film detective of other eras is usually a man who solves murders rather than commits them, where an undercurrent of violence, vice and criminality seems to leech into almost every element of the film's story, from its sisters downward.

It is into this noirish world that Marlowe is plunged; his first three encounters in the film, buttressing the otherworldly and detached figure of Sternwood, largely living vicariously on other people's enjoyment of his own previous vices are the sisters, Vivian and Carmen. Both are indictments of how far up the class system the rot has set in; Carmen is little more than a functioning alcoholic, practically throwing herself into Marlowe's arms, and whose lack of inhibitions eventually see her largely consigned to psychiatric care by her sister. Like many figures in noir, living in this morally flawed world means an eventual succumbing to the darkness at the heart of it. That this darkness is felt round the edges of the film is largely down to the still-present Hayes Code; Geiger is a blackmailer and pornographer;, but the film still manages to allude to the underbelly explored by films after the lifting of the Code.

Bogart and Bacall: The Big Sleep is dominated, and indeed recut to reframe, the duo's chemistry.

Against her is Bacall. Vivian is the character around which the film focuses; quite literally given what we are reviewing today is the second cut of the film, capitalising upon Bacall and Bogart's on-and-off-set romance and subsequent marriage to turn the film from a purely procedural detective film to its more character-driven focus, cutting two minutes from the film's runtime in the process. Bacall is that great femme fatale of film, at once using her feminine whiles to bring Marlowe deeper into the case-her initial meeting with him after her father is to immediately complicate matters with the (unseen) figure of Regan, but also, inexorably, falling in love with the detective. This is, of course, without mentioning Bacall's sheer presence as an actress, something that is utterly alluring to Bogart on and off-screen, and countless cinema-goers since.

Against this is Bogart himself; Marlowe is, in a word flawed, a typical noirish anti-heroic and indeed anti-social outsider, caught somewhere between the law and the criminal, a heavy-drinking creature of the night who still manages to be cool, and, to at least two women, utterly seductive. Yet whilst he is as tough as he is cinematically cool-Bogart remains perhaps the cinematic noir actor, he is a man adrift in a film that, for all its noirish sensibilities, feels more dreamlike than anything the genre would produce in its heyday and beyond: Marlowe is our guide, our Aeneas, in our descent into the Underworld of the City of Angels; without him and his rapport with Bacall, and the film's depiction of their attraction and romance, we are left chasing dead ends, shadows in the night, in a film that as much acts as anti-detective movie, as a shining example of the genre in its heyday.

Rating: Must See

The Big Sleep is available via streaming on Apple TV and on DVD from Warner Bros

Next week, to Japan, as we join Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai on the trail of a boy kidnapped to blackmail a wealthy industrialist in Akira Kurosawa's High and Low.

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