The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep is at least two movies.  The first is a typical private detective story.  Another is the detective-as-superstud story, in which Humphrey Bogart flirts with seven or so females who only appear in one scene, while mummering one-liners each time somebody whips out a gun.  Somehow this combination of narrative objectives works, though the categorization of this movie as “great” or “American classic” is silly because that’s mostly on the basis of Bogart looking cool and scoring chicks.

Maybe we’re just making this up, but the script is all over the place, seemingly because William Faulkner plus two other guys worked on it.  You can hear Faulkner coming through in weighty lines that includes phrases like “the flesh of men,” which doesn’t refer to skin, but to original sin.  But the hipster pizazz in this movie doesn’t seem Faulknerian at all.  Maybe he put in all of the self-referential lines about movies.  One character pulls out a gun, and the other character says, “Are you going to count to three, like they do in the movies?”  Thus the movie sometimes makes fun of itself, even though it is deadly serious most of the time.

This movie is all Bogart’s.  He is Philip Marlowe, private detective on a case for a rich old man.  The old man has two daughters, one of which is a proto-Britney Spears.  The other is married, though her eyes are on Bogart all the time.  We know what will happen, so never mind.  Marlowe’s case seems easy: a simple problem of who is blackmailing the old man.  But then someone is murdered.  Then more murders.  At one point the case  seems wrapped up, but for one reason or another, Marlowe decides to investigate the tangled web of crime without pay.  He’s either after the girl or ultimate truth.  Since there is more than one movie here, it is hard to say which.

The private detective, presaged by the Dupin character in some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, is a truth-seeker and truth-revealer.  There is serious Christian theology in characters like this, so little wonder that G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers embraced the detective figure in their fiction.  Since Bogart’s onscreen detective is a massive flirt — there would be plenty of sex and an R rating if this movie were made 40 years later — there is conflict in exactly what his ultimate mission is.  The Marlowe character here seems to settle for something in the middle: score lots of chicks while bringing the wicked into the light.

It’s a wonder that libertarians haven’t picked up on this movie and given it their blessing.  Here there’s a major contrast between the private detective, working on behalf of his contractor, and the official city police.  Most of the time, Marlowe is way ahead of all the policemen, but he seems held back by having to work with them.  There is a fine scene where Marlowe has to explain to the district attorney why he knows so much about the murders at hand.  It is clear that private enterprise, Marlowe in this case, works far more efficiently and effectively than the bumbling police.  In the end, the economic becomes the personal, as Marlowe doesn’t just work for the rich old man’s family anymore, but practically becomes one of the family.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 5

Morality: 7