The Infamously Confusing Big Sleep Is Still An All-Time Classic

Directors and fans alike dream of seeing their passion projects made with unlimited budgets, but constraints often place valuable boundaries on creative minds that otherwise threaten to run off the rails. Knowing what you can’t do lets you focus on what you can accomplish — and would Star Trek be quite as iconic if it hadn’t invented the transporter to save time and money?

The Big Sleep wasn’t limited by money when it hit theaters 80 years ago today, but it did have a strict moral budget. Howard Hawks’ adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel was made under the auspices of the Hays Code, when lust, crime, gunplay, and booze all had to be treated with caution. These restrictions neutered many mediocre movies, but Hawks and his writers worked with them to create a noir classic far more fun than what more explicit films can offer.

Private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is summoned to the estate of General Sternwood, who has a fatal illness and a headache. His younger daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers) is being blackmailed — again — and Sternwood laments that both his children have run wild. Marlowe doesn’t even make it out the door before the older sister, divorcee Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall), grills him, suggesting that her father really wants to find Sean Regan, a detective Sternwood had treated like a son before he vanished. Suddenly, Marlowe has two cases to worry about.

If that sounds a little complicated, don’t worry; it soon gets much, much, much more complicated. The Big Sleep is an infamously dense film — Chandler wrote his first Marlowe novel by gluing several of his short stories together, and as the anecdote goes, even the combined might of the production team couldn’t puzzle out how one character met his end. When they reached out to Chandler for clarification, he wasn’t sure either.

There’s a dizzying array of people and plot points to keep track of, and both had their edges sanded off by the Hays Code. In the novel, the cops are corrupt and Carmen explicitly runs afoul of a pornography ring; here, the local precinct is happy to help, and Carmen’s troubles are only alluded to with talk of “photos” after Marlowe discovers the poor girl dazed and alone in a house with a hidden camera and “exotic” Oriental decor.

In lieu of smut and muck, Warner Bros. played up the flirtation between Marlowe and Vivian, creating a Hays-approved happy ending while capitalizing on the real-life drama that was Bogie and Bacall. The pair have a good rapport, although every random clerk and cab driver Marlowe encounters is eager to throw themselves at him. It may not be as gritty or insightful as Chandler’s text, but The Big Sleep offers up an entertaining parade of thugs, dames, and swindlers, all of them willing to throw a punch or a zinger. And don’t worry about action; the Hays Code was never afraid to let the bodies of bad guys pile up.

In a way, the sheer confusion of it all plays to the movie’s benefit. Produced in 1944, The Big Sleep was pushed to 1946 so that Warner Bros. could focus on releasing its WWII films before the conflict ended. Signs of it litter the film — the loitering sailors, the gas ration sticker on Marlowe’s car — while all the double-crossing underlines the fact that a period of unity was ending. There would be no obvious enemies anymore.

At least, as America entered that scary new world, it would have Phillip Marlowe. Marlowe wasn’t the first hardboiled PI to jump from pulps like Black Mask to the big screen — Dashiell Hammett alone churned out Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and Nick and Nora Charles. But it’s Marlowe, the hard-drinking cynic with a stern moral code, who stands as the era’s quintessential product. An amalgam of Chandler’s forgotten early heroes and the characters who inspired them, he proved to be the most well-rounded and memorable of the bunch. Any two-bit private detective could take a beating, but it was Marlowe who seethed at the injustice of what he saw.

The detective was served well by Hawks’ all-star writing team of Jules Furthman, who wrote a long string of Hollywood hits; Leigh Brackett, whose lengthy sci-fi career would culminate with The Empire Strikes Back; and William Faulkner, who was William Faulkner. Their melded script had the mile-a-minute witticisms typical of a Hawks affair, and Bogart’s performance took full advantage of it. Bogart doesn’t quite match what you get from Marlowe on the page, nor does his portrayal resemble the memorable schlub Elliott Gould would offer 27 years later in The Long Goodbye. His Marlowe is his own man, a little more romantic and dazzling, and a lot more Hays-friendly.

Restrained from getting too sleazy, The Big Sleep is oddly glamorous; the villain’s casino is a classy joint, and even the pornographer’s pad doesn’t seem like a bad place to spend an evening. You might even buy that Marlowe and Vivian have found love. It feels like a movie that Marlowe would have scoffed at for bowdlerizing his craft, yet it remains a tremendous introduction to one of America’s most iconic characters. It would take the demise of the Hays Code to give us politically ruthless noirs like Chinatown, but The Big Sleep was a crackling screwball affair that previewed what Hollywood’s loneliest genre would become capable of.

The Big Sleep is available on YouTube.