| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-03-29 | | Series: | Bfi Film Classics |
| Size | | Length: | 73 pages | | Height: | 7.8 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 5.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
The Big Sleep: Marlowe and Vivian practising kissing; General Sternwood shivering in a hothouse full of orchids; a screenplay, co-written by Faulkner, famously mysterious and difficult to solve. Released in 1946, Howard Hawks' adaptation of Raymond Chandler reunited Bogart and Bacall and gave them two of their most famous roles. The mercurial but ever-manipulative Hawks dredged humour and happiness out of film noir. 'Give him a story about more murders than anyone can keep up with, or explain, ' David Thomson writes, 'and somehow he made a paradise.'. When it was first shown, to a military audience, The Big Sleep was coldly received. So, as Thomson reveals, Hawks shot extra scenes, 'fun' scenes, to replace one in which the film's murders had been explained, and in so doing left the plot unresolved. If this was accidental, Thomson argues, it also signalled a change in the nature of the Hollywood cinema: 'The Big Sleep inaugurates a postmodern, camp, satirical view of movies being about other movies that extends to the New Wave and Pulp Fiction.'.
This famously mysterious film starred Humphrey Bogart and Luren Bacall with a script co-written by William Faulkner. David Thomson reveals how the film illuminates the enigmatic character of director Howard Hawks and anticipates the postmodernism of contemporary cinema.
Industry Reviews
Thomson's short study of [The Big Sleep] is clever, eccentric, meandering, and self-indulgent--more on the background than on the picture.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Meyers
Thomson says The Big Sleep 'abandons story and genre as easily as one of its girls stepping out of her clothes.' He's projecting a little here, since the women in the movie only step out of their reserve, coming on to Bogart as if he were the Adonis he doggedly is not. But then Thomson is on his way to making what seems to me his strangest claim. Because it abandons story The Big Sleep 'is a movie about being a movie, about movie-ness. . . . It's a picture about its own process, the aim of making fun. . . . It is a dream about dreaming--maybe the best.' It's hard to see why it couldn't be about being a movie and be a great thriller, or be a great thriller because its was also about being a movie. But Thomson thinks The Big Sleep sets us on the road to Tarantino.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Wood
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