I’m a big fan of film noir, but what exactly is film noir? Well, it’s a genre or style, and it was coined in the twenties by French film critics describing Hollywood movies that they saw as dark and pessimistic, hence “black cinema” or “film noir”. Film noir movies tend to be thrillers or detective movies with certain common elements such as an anti-hero protagonist, a femme fatale (there go the French again), some tight, snappy dialogue, high-contrast cinematography, and a general sense of disillusionment or cynicism (as opposed to the idealism and happy endings of many an early Hollywood movie). What better example of film noir is there than Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep? (Clue: there probably isn’t one).
Adapted from Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel about blackmail and murder, we have Humphrey Bogart as the anti-hero, private detective Philip Marlowe, and Lauren Bacall as the smouldering seductress, Vivian Rutledge. Tight dialogue comes courtesy of William Faulkner (as an aside, Faulkner is better known as one of America’s greatest novelists – see The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!) who co-wrote the screenplay. The cinematography comes from the great auteur Howard Hawks (Bringing Up Baby, To Have and Have Not, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Rio Bravo et al).
The Big Sleep was released by Warner Bros on 31st August 1946, and was such a commercial success that two more “Bogie and Bacall” films were quickly made: Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948). The sexual chemistry between the newly-married Bogart and Bacall is famously electric, and the overall atmosphere is sultry and sumptuous. I have watched it at least twice and whilst I never really figured out what’s going on in its confusing plot, I never really cared, as I wasn’t there for the plot. I was there for Bogie and Bacall. Let’s watch Marlowe and Vivian’s first meeting, in which the verbal jousting sets the temperature for the rest of the movie.
