Ahhh. One of my favorite movies ever made. Obviously. I posted about it enough!
The Big Sleep 1946
Humphrey Bogart is Raymond Chandler's private eye in this witty, incredibly complicated thriller. You may not be able to figure out the plot even after the denouement (Chandler reported that while the film was in production, William Faulkner and the other screenwriters had to appeal to him for guidance, and apparently Chandelr couldn't exactly figure it out either), but it's the dialogue and the entertaining qualities of the individual sequences that make this movie. It takes place in the big city of displaced persons -- the night city, where sensation is all. The action is tense and fast, and the film catches the lurid Chandler atmosphere. The characters are a collection of sophisticated monsters -- blackmailers, pornographers, apathetic society girls (Lauren Bacall and Martha Vickers are a baffling pair of spoiled sisters; the latter sucks her thumb), drug addicts, nymphomaniacs (a brunette Dorothy Malone seduces the hero in what must surely be record time), murderers. All of them talk in innuendoes, as if that were a new stylization of the American language, but how reassuring it is to know what the second layer of meaning refers to. Howard Hawks directed -- and so well that you may even enjoy the fact that, as he says, "Neither the author, the writer, nor myself knew who had killed whom."
I never ever get tired of watching this movie. The script has to be one of the best scripts ever written. I love love this movie. And yes ... nobody knew who had done what. Not even Chandler, who wrote the thing. Classic.
One of my favorite scenes ever filmed is in The Big Sleep, and anyone who has seen it will know what I'm talking about when I say: "in the bookstore." I've watched this movie and gotten totally stuck on that bookstore scene, rewinding it over and over and over. It never gets old, and it never ceases to surprise.
God. Great movie.
Posted by sheila