A glorious muddle: The bewildering brilliance of The Big Sleep

When Howard Hawks was an old man watching his own movie The Big Sleep on TV, the legendary Hollywood director quickly found himself scratching his head. “I can’t follow the story,” he confessed to author and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. “It had me thoroughly confused.”

The film – a 1946 adaptation of the Raymond Chandler private eye novel, screening this month as part of the BFI Southbank’s Howard Hawks season – has caused similar levels of bafflement among generations of movie fans. “I think everybody got very confused. It’s a confusing book if you sit down and tear it apart. When you read it from page to page, it moves so beautifully that you don’t care, but if you start tearing it apart to see what makes it tick, it comes unglued,” the film’s young screenwriter Leigh Brackett (later to co-script The Empire Strikes Back) told interviewer Patrick McGilligan. She freely admitted that when she was working on the story, she had no idea about one key plot point – who had killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor? She and the film’s star Humphrey Bogart contacted co-writer William Faulkner to ask if he might know. No, came the reply. They sent a telegram to the novelist Chandler but he cabled back that he didn’t know either.

Following the plot of The Big Sleep is like trying to keep your footing on fast-flowing ice. Everything becomes very slippery very quickly. Grizzled LA detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is hired initially by the rich, old and sickly General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to resolve a murky blackmailing case involving his wayward younger daughter Carmen (Matha Vickers). Then he meets and falls for Sternwrood’s other, equally wayward, equally attractive older daughter, Mrs Rutledge (Lauren Bacall), and the plot complications begin to multiply.

This confusion is why audiences still cherish the movie – and why it has exercised such a strong pull on later filmmakers from Robert Altman to Paul Thomas Anderson. Conventional wisdom has it that traditional Hollywood filmmaking was punchy and concise and that it was only in the Sixties and Seventies, the era of Easy Rider, that directors started making big, baggy movies with convoluted, introspective plots structured like glorified shaggy dog stories. In fact, way back in the 1940s, Hawks was already experimenting with going a very long way off the narrative grid.

The Big Sleep is a glorious muddle – and that is exactly what it is supposed to be. Faulkner had been drinking heavily while working on the screenplay and probably wasn’t at his most clear-headed when writing it. Hawks himself had serious gambling debts when making it and therefore had no time to waste on ironing out any wrinkles in the plot. According to his biographer Todd McCarthy, he had a share in the profits of The Big Sleep and knew that if he went over budget, he would “hike the breakeven point”.

“The cheaper I made it, the more money I was going to make,” Hawks said of his realisation. He therefore shot “off the cuff”, doubling up on sets and making sure he never fell behind schedule. “In some instances, The Big Sleep looked perilously close to a B movie, with its anonymous backgrounds and dark shadows hiding the lack of production values,” McCarthy claimed.

Nonetheless, there was no sense that the director was panicking. “Certainly the most laidback director I’ve ever seen working – or just living – and, at the same time, the most clearly in command,” Bogdanovich commented after watching the director on set on one of his later movies. Hawks was famously imperturbable. Nothing threw him, not even when he couldn’t follow the plot line of his own movie. In fact, this was one project on which he did his best to hide the usual road signs. He had filmed a scene that explained who killed whom and why but it was cut out before release, presumably because he felt such a summing up diminished the mystique of the movie.

After all, Hawks had had his Eureka moment during shooting. “I realised that you don’t really have to have an explanation for things. As long as you make good scenes, you have a good picture – it doesn’t matter if it isn’t much of a story.”

The freewheeling approach perfectly suits the material. Just like the filmmakers themselves, Bogart’s private eye Philip Marlowe is continually forced to improvise. In one scene, he will put on spectacles, turn up his hat and pretend to be a neurotic collector of rare books in order to find out more about a suspect. In another, he will be imitating a hardboiled cop in order to elicit information from a landlord about a missing person. Whatever happens to him, whether he is dragged into an alleyway and beaten up by two heavies or accosted in his own apartment by his client’s deranged and flirtatious daughter, he reacts in the same stoical fashion.

There were strategic reasons for taking an oblique approach to the source material. The Chandler novel touched on subjects likely to upset the censors – blackmail, promiscuity and suicide among them. Some of the dialogue between Bogart and Bacall is laden with sexual double entendres, for example when they discuss horse riding. “You’ve got a touch of class but I don’t know how far you can go,” he tells her. “A lot depends on who is in the saddle,” she replies. Such moments might have prompted red flags but the film’s plotting was so digressive that the censors seemed to miss the risque elements. Nor did they notice the way that Hawks used smoking whenever he wanted to show sexual attraction between the characters: Bogart and Bacall are continually lighting cigarettes for each other.

Something about Los Angeles itself legislates against taut storytelling. The city is such a sprawl that characters have to drive miles to get from one destination to another. Nothing happens easily or quickly. At moments of maximum tension, Marlowe will say, “I’ll be there in 40 minutes,” climb into his car and trundle off down the road.

“The Big Sleep is impossible to follow but it doesn’t matter. You just want to keep watching it, seeing where it goes,” Paul Thomas Anderson enthused about Hawks’s movie in a 2014 interview. His own LA-set films like Inherent Vice (2014) and Licorice Pizza (2021) have been just as circuitous. The former, a 1970s-set detective yarn adapted from a Thomas Pynchon novel, seemed even more bewildering than The Big Sleep because it takes place in a drug-filled haze. At least Bogart’s Philip Marlowe isn’t a stoner and doesn’t smoke dope. He prefers spirits. “How do you like your brandy, sir?” General Sternwood asks him at the start of the movie. “In a glass,” comes back the typically sardonic reply.

Altman is another filmmaker who owes an obvious debt to Hawks. When he emerged as a major director in the 1970s, critics saw his freewheeling approach to narrative in films like McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) and Nashville (1975) as reflecting the counter-culture spirit of time as well as his obsession with free form jazz. In fact, as Altman later admitted, he was borrowing from Hawks. “In many of the Howard Hawks films, overlapping dialogue was used,” he said of why, in his movies, characters often talk at once or speak over each other.

Like Hawks, Altman loved Raymond Chandler’s novels but found them largely indecipherable. “I became fascinated with the way in which Chandler used these plots in stories not for the story’s sake but to hang a bunch of thumbnail essays about this city, the time,” Altman commented when he made his own Philip Marlowe movie, The Long Goodbye (1973), for which Hawks’s old collaborator Brackett wrote the screenplay.

Reviewers were aghast at Altman’s decision to recruit the shambolic Elliott Gould, who had starred in his earlier film M*A*S*H, to play a very laidback Philip Marlowe. The LA Times described him in the role as “an untidy, unshaven, semi-literate dimwit slob who could not locate a missing skyscraper and would be refused service at a hot dog stand”.

Look back at Hawks’s movie, though, and you quickly realise that Bogart’s Marlowe was rough around the edges too. He’s 38 years old, a “shamus” (as private eyes are nicknamed) living such a hand-to-mouth existence that when Bacall gives him a cheque for $500, it’s as if he has scooped the lottery. He is short in stature, self-deprecating and very sarcastic. He’s also a relentless womaniser, in one early scene seducing a youthful bookstore clerk (Dorothy Malone) who closes the shop for the afternoon so she can share his rye whisky and (it’s implied) have sex with him. In another, he chats up a female taxi driver who is helping him tail a suspect. When he first kisses Bacall, he is still trying to prise information out of her. He is ostensibly the movie’s hero but the film’s most prominent villain, the smooth, well-spoken Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) is the one with decent manners.

The Big Sleep has an ironic, fatalistic humour that still feels very modern. It’s among the most celebrated private eye movies of all time and yet it often seems like a tongue-in-cheek spoof of the genre. “Well, you can’t take one of those things too seriously. You might as well have fun with it,” Hawks said, summing up perfectly why the film has lasted so well while other more earnest gangster and detective movies are long forgotten.

‘The Big Sleep’ is screening at the BFI Southbank on 21 & 28 June