Left Field Cinema

Very rarely can a film ever be boiled down to one sole scene and almost never with a movie as notoriously complicated as The Big Sleep. However, The Big Sleep has a scene of such wit and dialogue that it defines not only the film but also a whole genre.

The scene begins as all good noir does with a man and a girl. The girl is looking for something, both of them know what it is, neither of them will speak it – pornographic photographs of the girl. Marlowe, the man, is employed by the father and is falling for her sister. The woman, Carmen, has never met a man who does not fall for her beauty. They talk; the dialogue is as biting and cynical as Noir has ever been. Then there is a rustling at the door, and door bell rings, the scene kicks into high gear. In enters trouble and the heady Noir brew is complete; the mixture of sex then death. Eddie Mars enters, completely composed despite the fact that he also should not be there. The two men begin to talk, Marlowe leaning back insolent in his cool. Mars standing hard faced and questioning. They stare at each other; everyone knows how this movie will end! Mars allows the girl to leave, and threatens Marlowe with the men waiting outside. Marlowe stays. Mars finds blood and declares he will call the cops, Marlowe agrees. Next follows one of the finest dialogue scenes in movie history:

Eddie Mars: Convenient, the door being open when you didn't have a key, eh?
Philip Marlowe: Yeah, wasn't it. By the way, how'd you happen to have one?
Eddie Mars: Is that any of your business?
Philip Marlowe: I could make it my business.
Eddie Mars: I could make your business mine.
Philip Marlowe: Oh, you wouldn't like it. The pay's too small.

Howard Hawks, Humphrey Bogart, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman combined in a variety of ways to create this single scene, which is perhaps the finest committed to celluloid. The level of talent to create the scene is overwhelming. Beginning with the origin of the scene, Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name. Chandler is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers in modern American fiction admired by many including WH Auden and Graham Greene. He wrote a series of hard-boiled novels containing his wonderful character Phillip Marlowe. Chandler’s Marlowe is a complex character, he is violent, sexist, depraved yet surprisingly tender, the definition of a knight in tarnished armour. Over the course of Chandler’s novels a complete portrait is built up of this most singular of Private Detectives. The Long Goodbye, which was Raymond Chandler’s penultimate book is his masterpiece, the story is one of the most brilliantly written and fully realised evocations of not only a character trying to do his best in a disintegrating world but also the one of the most finely detailed descriptions of a city ever committed to paper. But what Chandler did better than almost anyone in literature was dialogue. During the 1940’s Chandler was a sought after screenwriter of the highest quality. He contributed scripts to a few of the greatest film noirs: Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train and The Blue Dahlia. His credits speak for themselves. The scene from The Big Sleep is almost all completely performed as it is written in Raymond Chandler’s wonderful book, so it is not surprising that this single scene can be extrapolated to describe a whole genre. Raymond Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett and James M Cain, created not only Hardboiled Fiction but through this and Chandler’s work on Double Indemnity they practically created the Film Noir genre. His contribution to this defining moment is absolute, there would have been no Film Noir without his wonderful writing, and it is fitting that he creates the scene that captures the moment so clearly.

However, Raymond Chandler despite being a prodigious screenwriter did not contribute to the screenplay, this was completed by one of the most respected and critically acclaimed writers of American letters, William Faulkner. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and his work includes the classic As I Lay Dying and The Sound and The Fury. The level of respect attributed to Faulkner work is immense, and he brought a unique style to adapting Chandler’s prose. Not only did he keep the scenes which work he also added a lot, the romance of the film was amped up after Howard Hawks recognised the star wattage and sexual tension inherent within Bogart and Bacall when onscreen together. The dialogue becomes even more blistering than in Chandler’s original text. Faulkner along with his co-screenplay writers Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman had an additional difficult job during the adaptation, taming down the more overtly sexual aspects of the novel. Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman were brilliant screenwriters in their own right, contributing scripts to Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye, The Empire Strikes Back, Mutiny on the Bounty and Nightmare Alley among many others. These three writers, along with Chandler’s original text, combined to produce what is perhaps the most convoluted and complex screenplay of any film ever made. Just who killed Joe Brody?

Howard Hawks was a magnificent director and the perfect filmmaker to bring the dialogue heavy Big Sleep to the screen. His best work was characterised by his strong female characters, Hawksian Women, and impossibly fast paced dialogue. It can be argued that what really set Noir apart was its style, a black and white visual palette that had its root in German Expressionism. Hawks was not a visual director who competed with the best of his contemporaries, and although this scene does contain beautiful black and white photography it does not resort to the more typical visual noir tics. However, noticeably throughout the beginning of the scene Mars is in shadow and Marlowe in bright white light. This scene is rooted in the beginning of the genre from its literary source, through an important facet of the unspoken sex and death inherent in all of Film Noir. This existential crisis was the heart of greatest Film Noir’s, rarely has there been a protagonist who enjoyed looking into the abyss more than Phillip Marlowe.

Then comes the reason why this scene zings off the screen, why it has not aged a day since 1946, Humphrey Bogart. Bogart was one of the finest stars of the Hollywood system from his era defining turn in Casablanca to his more seedy less romantic roles in Nicolas Ray’s wonderful In A Lonely Place and The Harder They Fall. He was a bizarre choice for the studio to make a leading man with his unique look and lisp, Cary Grant he was not. Bogart brought a sense of danger to cinema, a hero whose charisma did not hide the darkness inherent in both the character and the man. Bogart was an actor of extraordinary range but he excelled within the Noir genre, so it is not surprising that it is his witty repartee that comes to define not only a film, but also a genre, and a time where Hollywood had to value the script more than stunts or special effects.

The scene continues from the celebrated dialogue above with threats, a drawn gun and a continuation of some of the best Existential dialogue ever written, and then at the end Marlowe moves easily and unhurriedly towards the door, perhaps he expects to be shot but he moves without a care in the world. Ext Scene.

The rest of the film is not too bad either.

W. McLachlan