A glorious muddle: The bewildering brilliance of The Big Sleep

Howard Hawks’s 1946 Raymond Chandler adaptation has confused filmmakers and fans for decades. But, writes Geoffrey Macnab, its chaos is vital to its charm

In ‘The Big Sleep’, Humphrey Bogart’s LA detective falls for Lauren Bacall’s Mrs Rutledge (Hollywood Photo Archive/Mediapunch/Shutterstock)

When Howard Hawks was an old man watching his own movie The Big Sleep on TV, the legendary Hollywood director quickly found himself scratching his head. “I can’t follow the story,” he confessed to author and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. “It had me thoroughly confused.”

The film – a 1946 adaptation of the Raymond Chandler private eye novel, screening this month as part of the BFI Southbank’s Howard Hawks season – has caused similar levels of bafflement among generations of movie fans. “I think everybody got very confused. It’s a confusing book if you sit down and tear it apart. When you read it from page to page, it moves so beautifully that you don’t care, but if you start tearing it apart to see what makes it tick, it comes unglued,” the film’s young screenwriter Leigh Brackett (later to co-script The Empire Strikes Back) told interviewer Patrick McGilligan. She freely admitted that when she was working on the story, she had no idea about one key plot point – who had killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor? She and the film’s star Humphrey Bogart contacted co-writer William Faulkner to ask if he might know. No, came the reply. They sent a telegram to the novelist Chandler but he cabled back that he didn’t know either.

Following the plot of The Big Sleep is like trying to keep your footing on fast-flowing ice. Everything becomes very slippery very quickly. Grizzled LA detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is hired initially by the rich, old and sickly General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to resolve a murky blackmailing case involving his wayward younger daughter Carmen (Matha Vickers). Then he meets and falls for Sternwrood’s other, equally wayward, equally attractive older daughter, Mrs Rutledge (Lauren Bacall), and the plot complications begin to multiply.