The Big Sleep (1946 film)

The composition of the screenplay involved three writers, including the American novelist William Faulkner. The writing had to be acceptable to the Hays Office censorship, which was vehement about excluding sexual themes.[8] In the novel, Geiger is selling pornography, illegal then and associated with organized crime, and is a homosexual having a relationship with Lundgren. Carmen is described as being nude in Geiger's house and later nude and in Marlowe's bed. To pass the censorship, changes were made; Carmen had to be fully dressed and the pornographic elements could only be alluded to with cryptic references to photographs of Carmen wearing a "Chinese dress" and sitting in a "Chinese chair". The sexual orientation of Geiger and Lundgren goes unmentioned in the film because explicit references to homosexuality were prohibited.[8]

The scene of Carmen in Marlowe's bed was replaced with a scene in which she appears, fully dressed, sitting in Marlowe's apartment, when he promptly kicks her out. The scene, shot in 1944, was entirely omitted in the 1945 cut but restored for the 1946 version.[8] The Big Sleep is known for its convoluted plot. During filming, neither the director nor the cast knew whether the chauffeur Owen Taylor had killed himself or was murdered.[9] A cable was sent to Chandler, who told his friend Jamie Hamilton in a March 21, 1949 letter: "They sent me a wire ... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either".[10]

Warner Bros. studio head Jack L. Warner was frustrated that he was shut out of the production and sent a memo:

"Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop."[11]

Bogart and Bacall on the set during filming

After its completion, Warner Bros. did not release The Big Sleep until they had turned out a backlog of war-related films. Because the war was ending, the studio feared the public might lose interest in the films, while The Big Sleep's subject was timeless. Indications of the film's wartime production include period dialogue, pictures of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a woman taxi driver, who says to Bogart, "I'm your girl". Wartime rationing influences the film: dead bodies are called "red points", which referred to wartime meat rationing and Marlowe's car has a "B" gasoline rationing sticker in the lower passenger-side window, indicating he is essential to the war effort and therefore allowed eight gallons of gasoline per week.

The "Bogie and Bacall" phenomenon, a fascination with the couple that began with To Have and Have Not, was well developed by the end of the war. Bacall's agent, Charles K. Feldman, asked that portions of the film be re-shot to capitalize on their chemistry and counteract the poor reviews Bacall had received for her performance in Confidential Agent (1945) which was released prior to The Big Sleep, even though it was produced after the original principal photography.[12] Jack Warner agreed and new scenes for The Big Sleep, such as the sexually suggestive racehorse dialogue, were added (scripted by an uncredited Julius Epstein).[13] The re-shot ending featured Peggy Knudsen as Mona Mars because Pat Clark, the originally cast actress, was unavailable. The parts of James Flavin and Thomas E. Jackson were eliminated. Because of the two versions created by the re-shooting, there is a substantial difference in content of some twenty minutes between them, although the difference in running time is only two minutes. Chandler said Martha Vickers (Carmen) overshadowed Lauren Bacall (Vivian) in their scenes together, which led to the producers deleting much of Vickers' performance to enhance Bacall's.[14]

At the time of its 1946 release, Bosley Crowther said the film leaves the viewer "confused and dissatisfied", points out that Bacall is a "dangerous looking female" ..."who still hasn't learned to act" and notes:

The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused. And, to make it more aggravating, the brilliant detective in the case is continuously making shrewd deductions which he stubbornly keeps to himself. What with two interlocking mysteries and a great many characters involved, the complex of blackmail and murder soon becomes a web of utter bafflement. Unfortunately, the cunning script-writers have done little to clear it at the end.[15]

Time film critic James Agee called the film "wakeful fare for folks who don't care what is going on, or why, so long as the talk is hard and the action harder" but insists that "the plot's crazily mystifying, nightmare blur is an asset, and only one of many"; it calls Bogart "by far the strongest" of its assets and says Hawks, "even on the chaste screen...manages to get down a good deal of the glamorous tawdriness of big-city low life, discreetly laced with hints of dope addiction, voyeurism and fornication" and characterizing Lauren Bacall's role as "an adolescent cougar".[16]

In the mid-1990s, a pre-release version—director Hawks's original cut—was found in the UCLA Film and Television Archive. That version had been released to the military to play to troops in the South Pacific. Benefactors, led by American magazine publisher Hugh Hefner, raised the money to pay for its restoration and the original version of The Big Sleep was released in art-house cinemas in 1997 for a short exhibition run, along with a comparative documentary about the cinematic and content differences between Hawks's film noir and the Warner Brothers "movie star" version.[17]

Film critic Roger Ebert included the film in his list of "Great Movies" and wrote,

Working from Chandler's original words and adding spins of their own, the writers (William Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett) wrote one of the most quotable of screenplays: it's unusual to find yourself laughing in a movie not because something is funny but because it's so wickedly clever.[18]

Ebert praised the film's writing (the above quote is not specific to the 1945 version but is in reference to both films). Ebert preferred the 1946 version and said,

The new scenes [of the 1946 version] add a charge to the film that was missing in the 1945 version; this is a case where "studio interference" was exactly the right thing. The only reason to see the earlier version is to go behind the scenes, to learn how the tone and impact of a movie can be altered with just a few scenes... As for the 1946 version that we have been watching all of these years, it is one of the great films noir, a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler's ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares.[4]

In a 1997 review, Eric Brace of The Washington Post wrote that the 1945 original had a "slightly slower pace than the one released a year later and a touch less zingy interplay between Bogart and Bacall, but it's still an unqualified masterpiece".[17]

In 2003, AFI named Philip Marlowe the 32nd greatest hero in film.[19] The film placed 202nd on the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made and also received two directors' votes.[20]