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The Big Sleep: An Out of Balance Camelot

By Natasha Grant · September 16, 2014

Biographers tell us that, as a boy, Raymond Chandler was obsessed with tales of chivalry. And the 1946 adaptation of his first Philip Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep, seems to bring those ideas sharply into focus.

Starkly filmed in black and white, the film shows us that there is no clear right and wrong, no goodies and baddies. Shades of grey prevail. As Howard Hawks shows us that people – their families, lives and loves – are complicated.

The Sternwood house, with its high ceilings and wood panelling, is as near to Camelot as 1930’s California can manage. But, this Camelot is out of balance somehow. Gone to seed.

General Sternwood, enthroned in his wheelchair, is more King Lear than King Arthur. Fretting over his daughters, his money and his good name sheltered in self-imposed martyrdom among the exotic plants he claims to so intensely dislike.

But there is also something of the voyeur about the good judge. For all his high-minded rhetoric, he seems to relish the gory details of the mess his daughters have made of their lives. Marlowe, by contrast, seems to take a fatherly interest in them: trying to clean up the mess rather than wallowing in it or blindly throwing money at it in to hope that it will go away.

Then, there’s youngest daughter Carmen, staring out wide-eyed at the world. Biting her thumb in a gesture that is both endearingly childlike and intensely sexual. Carmen describes- or perhaps “dismisses” is a better word- Marlowe as a prizefighter. And Marlowe, in the manner of a visiting godparent trying to please an attention-seeking toddler, goes along with the game. “That’s right. The name’s Reilly. Doghouse Reilly.”

And it is true that Marlowe is handy with, if not his fists, then certainly his open palm. Slapping a semi-comatose Carmen as she struggles to regain consciousness after being drugged to pose for Geiger’s explicit photos. Later, clad demurely in a white bed jacket, she balks at something he says. “Take it easy,” he warns. “I don’t slap so good this time of the evening.”

Humphrey Bogart plays Marlowe as a disillusioned Robin of Loxley back from the crusades – he’s simultaneously charmingly idealistic and punch drunk with all the horrible things he knows people can do to each other. As Mrs. Regan, Lauren Bacall is Marlowe’s equal. Glamourous, intelligent and acerbic, she nonetheless conceals a vulnerability that draws Marlowe to her. Their dialogue fizzes with romantic comedy timing and the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall that is always so much in evidence on screen. What also strikes me now, though – having gone back and watched the film for this review – is the astounding youth of both Bacall and the character she’s playing. Beneath Mrs. Regan’s elegant tailoring and smart mouth, Bacall’s eyes are wide and frightened and full of love for the lost, dishevelled man she’s playing opposite.

If he were around in the early twenty-first century, Marlowe – and especially the Marlowe created by Howard Hawks and Bogart – would probably be diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He drinks too much, keeps a gun in desk drawer and deflects his pain with humour and focusing on the job in hand. But, behind his eyes is a well of pain he’d really much rather we didn’t see. In 1946, when   The Big Sleep was released, the world was still trembling from the aftershocks of World War II. Thousands of men, like our hero hoping for better things, doubted very much whether these aftershocks would come to pass.

People are now used to the idea of the careworn, street-smart, battle-scarred and good-hearted detective who flouts rules, likes women and drinks quite a bit more than is good for him. Marlowe’s print and screen persona have become a cliché. But, for a cliché to be a cliché, there has to be some truth to it in the first place.

If this film is, as Chandler would probably have intended, a modern chivalric quest, then Marlowe is rewarded in time-honoured fashion. Unlike in Chandler’s novel, onscreen Marlowe is allowed to get the girl in a beautifully filmed, fervently passionate kissing scene. Yes, it could be argued that such a scene is out of place in a “gritty detective story,” but it feels right in this case. Marlowe doesn’t get half the kingdom in exchange for defending Mrs. Regan’s honour but you can’t have everything, can you?