The Big Sleep Essay Assignment
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THE BIG SLEEP (1946) 114m
NARRATIVE COSIDERATIONS:
Plot?!? We don’t need no steenkin’ plot!!
The Big Sleep is not exactly a failure, but its success exists within the severest limitations, and the current widespread admiration for it is worth consideration.
On its first appearance it was attacked for violence and amorality. Its reputation has grown out of all proportion to its achievement because of those very qualities that aroused hostility in the forties: violence, cynicism, tough attitudes, ‘black’ humour are fashionable now, and so is Bogart. Curiously, the real qualities of The Big Sleep seem largely to have been overlooked, by attackers and adulators alike.
The question of style and method is crucial. On it depends the great difference between Hawks’s film and Chandler’s book (which it follows pretty closely in terms of narrative). The book is narrated in the first person by Marlowe, and the reader is restricted throughout—a limitation so confining as to undermine any claims to serious attention made for Chandler—to Marlowe’s slick and crude sensibility, which nothing in the book ‘places’. We are compelled to see all the characters in Marlowe’s terms, and in the language of a cynical arrested adolescent, insisting tiresomely on its own smartness.
At no point and in no way does Hawks attempt a visual equivalent for this style. Nor does he imprison us in Marlowe’s consciousness…
…The openness of Hawks’s film— the cool, objective, classical style, editing and camera-movement strictly functional—never oppresses the spectator.
A somewhat negative reason for admiring the film. What, more positively, are the characteristics that transform the atmosphere of Chandler’s novel into the subtly different atmosphere of the film? It seems perverse to say it of a film either praised or denounced for its blackness and savagery, a film containing seven (I think) murders and various incidental brutalities; but they are charm and tenderness. Their presence is partly identical with that of Humphrey Bogart, but not entirely explained by it. The film gives us repeatedly, and the book almost never, a sense of positive, sympathetic relationships; in the book the characters merely adopt varyingly ‘tough’ attitudes towards each other. The mutual affection and respect that develop so naturally between Marlowe and General Sternwood in the opening sequence is barely hinted at in the book, which also offers no equivalent for the tenderness, so simply expressed, between Bogart and the girl in the bookshop (Dorothy Malone). Above all there is the Bogart-Bacall relationship, where, though the dialogue (much of it original Chandler) remains tough and cynical, the acting conveys a mutual sympathetic awareness. The altogether charming and funny little scene where they telephone the police then try to convince whoever is on the other end that he was phoning them looks like one of those collaborative inspirations of director and players that just grew.
It is also illuminating to set Hawks’s film beside Huston’s Maltese Falcon. Huston’s film is more single-minded, the plot clearer: faithful translation of Hammett’s novel. Hawks’s film is more open. Huston is so determined to explain the plot that there is an inordinate amount of talk: more, even, than in The Big Sleep. The treatment of plot in Hawks’s film is casual. Hardly anyone can follow it, including apparently Hawks, who maintains that he still doesn’t know who committed one of the murders. The film follows Chandler’s plot fairly closely until the book’s last chapter, then suddenly opts for a different killer. To have Bacall turn out to be the killer would certainly have gone against the whole spirit of the film, but the last-minute switch doesn’t make for clarity. Isn’t this indifference to plot evidence of Hawks’s strength rather than weakness? One respects him for conceiving the film primarily in terms of the Bogart- Bacall relationship, and of Bogart’s moral relationship to the back- ground and general atmosphere. While Hammett is superior to Chandler, Hawks is superior to Huston. But the Chandler-Hammett atmosphere is too stifling for Hawks to breathe in happily: he lets in what fresh air he can.
-Robin Wood’s “Failures and Marginal Works”
So, we must keep our senses open to the crisp and sassy dialogue offered by Chandler/Faulkner/Hawks/Brackett, while not getting bogged down in the plot, for that would be utterly futile.
STYLISTIC CONSIDERATIONS:
-Opening Credits with silhouetted leads in true noir fashion (think Wilder’s Double Indemnity.)
-Hard-boiled dialogue mixed with Hawks’ penchant for overlapping.
-Extraordinary black and white contrast
-Hawksian shorthand for sex…from innuendo (horse-racing dialogue ‘tween Bogie & Bacall) to actual dalliance with Dorothy Malone’s bookstore proprietress.
GEMS:
“She tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up.”
Please read the reading which I uploaded. The scanned document. And citated from the article. When you citate, please use quotation.
Supplemental
Screening: “BACALL TO ARMS” Merrie
Melodies 6m
Reading: Wood’s “Failures and Marginal
Works” Pp. 168-170
INSTRUCTIONS FOR ALL ESSAYS:
*MAKE CERTAIN TO SIGNIFICANTLY CITE SOURCES, with extra credit
consideration a distinct probability for citations from significant
other readings. Lack of, or scant
citations, will result in a far poorer grade, regardless of your writing
proficiency.
Include a cover sheet
containing an essay title, your name, course number and date.
Number your pages (bottom
center preferred).
Make certain to
avoid the following pitfalls:
1.
Do not write plot summaries. (Elements of the story or the plot of a film
should be used as specifically brief details to explain or discuss the ideas of
the film, and its relation/significance to our course topics.)
2.
Avoid vague and
unnecessary evaluative terms like “beautiful photography,” “superb acting,” or
“tight direction.”
3.
Always support general arguments with specific film examples
described as accurately as possible.
4.
Use the characters’ names–not
the actors’–when discussing the film but give the actor’s name in parentheses
on first use.
5.
Underline or italicize film titles. Do not place them “in quotes.”
6.
DO NOT indulge in loose and careless use of terms like symbolism or
foreshadowing; indeed, you would probably be better off avoiding them
altogether. So too, DO NOT use the phrases “throughout the film…” or “…gives
the feeling of…,” for they invariably get absurdly repetitive. Do not refer to the viewer or audience
or use expressions like “we see” or “you hear” as these also
become woefully, nauseatingly repetitious.
7.
Do not describe
the film using first person (I/we) or second person (you) pronouns. Comments like “we see Baby and Johnny
together for the first time . . .” would be better written as “Baby and Johnny
are together for the first time . . ..”
8.
Do not mix your
tenses and always keep your verbiage in the present tense! (i.e., “The character IS /
DOES / HAS” rather than was, did and had.)
9.
Properly,
indeed meticulously, PROOF & EDIT
your work before submitting. Grades drop
precipitously with each instance of poorly proofed errors.
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