The Big Sleep is credited with having one of the most confusing storylines of any motion picture ever made. A restored copy of the 1944 edition was assembled by archivists at UCLA during the '90s, and is now available on home video and DVD along with the second, better rendition. The final version of The Big Sleep was released in 1946. In the process, an entire reel was replaced, adding the Bogart/Bacall restaurant scene and eliminating a lengthy conversation between Marlowe and the DA that explained several plot points. A number of new sequences were committed to celluloid, most of which played off the obvious real-life chemistry between Bogart and Bacall (who were now married) that had been so popular in To Have and Have Not. So, a year after the initial filming, Hawks brought back most of the cast for re-shoots. The Big Sleep could wait a year or two.ĭuring the picture's period in limbo, Hawks re-considered the movie's composition (prompted, at least in part, by correspondence with Bacall's agent, who was dissatisfied with a number of his client's scenes). Principal photography occurred during 1944, but, after the film was in the can, it ended up sitting on the shelf while Warner Brothers rushed a backlog of war films into theaters, fearing that the end of the conflict would dry up the market.
After signing Bogart and Bacall as the leads, Hawks hired his To Have and Have Not writers, William Faulkner and Jules Furthman to adapt Chandler's novel, giving them strict instructions to retain as much of the original dialogue as possible (the third credited screenwriter, Leigh Brackett, had written a previous, unused draft).
Legendary director Howard Hawks first embarked upon the task of bringing The Big Sleep to the screen in 1944. Of all of these portrayals, Bogart's is easily the most memorable, and if you ask any movie-lover who the real cinematic Marlowe is, the answer will be immediate and unqualified. Marlowe, the hard-drinking loner with a sharp one-liner for any situation, has been played by the likes of George Montgomery, Robert Montgomery, Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum (twice), James Garner, James Caan, and Bogart. Only Playback, Chandler's final Marlowe book, has never made it to the screen. Over the years, six of them have been adapted into films (several more than once): The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, and The Long Goodbye. The Big Sleep, published in 1939, was the first of seven Philip Marlowe novels written by Chandler. Meanwhile, Bogart appeared in handful of noir classics, including the first acknowledged entry into the genre, 1941's The Maltese Falcon, and The Big Sleep. Along with Dashiel Hammett and Cornell Woolrich, Chandler was among the most read and best known pulp fiction writers, and his success in print allowed him to make the leap to Hollywood, where screenplays like Double Indemnity and Strangers on the Train earned him an even greater reputation. Of all the authors, actors, and directors associated with film noir over the years, two are the most immediately recognizable: novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler and star Humphrey Bogart (a third, Alfred Hitchcock, will not be discussed here). With its roots in both German Expressionism and the American hard-boiled detective fiction of the '20s and '30s, film noir caught on with a public in search of dark thrills and hard-bitten heroes.
The big sleep no more movie#
During the 1940s and 1950s, film noir was one of the most popular Hollywood movie forms.
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