"Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains!"
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made a dynamite couple, onscreen and off. Their second and best collaboration was The Big Sleep (1946), a classy adaptation of Raymond Chandler's iconic detective novel.Phillip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) meets with General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), a wealthy aristocrat with two wayward daughters, Vivian (Lauren Bacall) and Carmen (Martha Vickers). Sternwood asks Marlowe to help resolve Carmen's gambling debts, but Marlowe suspects something else is going on. Vivian intercedes, steering Marlowe towards her father's missing friend Sean Regan, and bookseller A.G. Geiger turns up dead. Things tie back to Eddie Mars (John Ridgley), a gambler with close ties to Vivian.
The Big Sleep is a master class in cinematic storytelling. Howard Hawks' seamless direction matches a faultless script (co-written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman) to navigate Marlowe's dense novel. Sleep manages not only snappy dialog but telling characterizations, etching minor characters like the General and a sultry bookstore owner (Dorothy Malone) as strong as the leads. If the plot occasionally grows muddled, the movie has myriad charms to compensate.
Few directors bettered Hawks in charged dialog or tough, professional characters. Marlowe disarms men and women alike with his incisive repartee. His dalliances don't disturb his work; he pegs Carmen as a troublemaker from her swooning introduction, and remains unfazed by hulking goons and smooth-talking villains alike. Naturally, the film centers on his relationship with Vivian, reeling from a sham marriage and gambling addiction. Chandler's rougher material (insinuations of homosexuality, making Geiger a porn dealer) scarcely seem missed.
Humphrey Bogart's never been more appealing, making Marlowe a tough guy with an abrasive, sensual edge. Even more than Sam Spade, it epitomizes Bogart's screen image as a hardboiled tough with a hidden heart. Lauren Bacall's sultry toughness makes a swoon-worthy match, more engaging than your standard femme fatale. She's duplicitous but also vulnerable and sympathetic, her chemistry with Bogart making even banal exposition into pointed barbs.
Martha Vickers saw her scenes cut to focus on Bacall; even so, her desperately damaged Carmen makes a strong impression. Dorothy Malone and Sonia Darrin play other Hawksian women, equally sharp and tough. Elisha Cook Jr. stands out as a friendly detective who meets a gruesome end. The movie's villains (John Ridgley's glad-handing gambler, Louis Jean Heydt's blackmailer) are more simplistic personages.
The Big Sleep is as edgy and stylish as any noir should be. For all its crackerjack craftsmanship, its stars are the main draw. And why not? There's rarely been a better pairing than Bogey and Bacall.
