For Bould, then, “while The Big Sleep might be remarkable, it is far from exceptional (69).Įven Hagopian believes that the anarchic structure of the film, more than anything, should be seen as a reflection of the chaotic circumstances under which the film was produced. Hollywood narratives, he declares, are not nearly as consistently coherent as Thomson believes even very mainstream Hollywood films often depend as much on spectacular individual scenes as on smooth narrative flow. Mark Bould, on the other hand, disagrees, arguing that Thomson exaggerates the extent to which Golden Age Hollywood films in general obeyed a very strict idea of convention narrative. David Thomson-noting aspects of the film such as its use of far more characters than are really needed to tell its story-declares that it is “one of the most formally inventive ever made in Hollywood” (64). There has, however, been considerable disagreement over just how much of the deviation of The Big Sleep from the Hollywood norm is a matter of genuine aesthetic innovation. Innovations that make the film a forerunner of later postmodernist films byįilmmakers such as David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. Hollywood narrative might potentially be seen, not as mistakes, but as For Hagopian, though, the film’s deviations from accepted practices of These elaborations constantly threaten to distend the film into insensibility” Reasoning than the classical Hollywood cinema regularly demands of its viewers. Thus, Kevin Hagopian describes The Big Sleep as a film “whose narrativeĮlaborations are only decipherable through far more advanced elliptical Of film noir lore, for example, though later critics have been more generous. Impenetrability of the film’s narrative in his initial New York Times review of the film have become an established part Bosley Crowther’s initial complaints about the Some extent, it complicates it in others, and the film is well known for its baroquelyĬomplicated (and under-explained) plot, which often leaves viewers guessing inĪn effort to fill in the gaps. Nevertheless, while it simplifies the convoluted plot of Chandler’s novel to Success that only added to Bogart’s growing prominence in Hollywood. The Big Sleep was a substantial commercial With disjunctions and contradictions, a fact that might ultimately be its greatest Of its complex and confusing plot structure. In addition, the film breaks all kinds of rules of Hollywood narrative in terms Significantly from the Hollywood norm, as in its tendency, inherited fromĬhandler, to depict American society as corrupt and decadent to its very core. Mainstream than most noir films in a number of ways, though it also deviates Respected names (as both a director and a producer). And the film wasĭirected and produced by Howard Hawks, one of Hollywood’s biggest and most

Jules Furthman), giving it additional cultural credibility. Novelist William Faulkner (along with veteran screenwriters Leigh Brackett and

The screenplay, meanwhile, was co-written by famed Played by megastar Humphrey Bogart, just reaching his zenith as Hollywood’sīiggest male star, thus taking film noir into more mainstream territory than it Chandler’s 1939 novel of the same title, is notable partly because itsĭetective figure, Philip Marlowe (played by Dick Powell in the 1944 Chandler

The big sleep no more