'The Big Sleep' is a difficult book to adapt and make Hollywood-accessible,
mainly due to its dark and convoluted plot, but this difficulty was compounded
for Hawks by the censorship restrictions which made amoral character motivations
more enigmatic than they could have been. Winner's take on the book, although
not so restricted by censorship, suffers greatly from its budget-driven
relocation from Los Angeles to London and from the 'Fifties to the then
contemporary late 'Seventies. Winner also pronouncedly lacks Hawk's cinematic
verve and energy, and Mitchum seems determined to underline this trait in his
lethargic performance.
I think Bogart's delivery of Chandler's dialogue (and Hawks' movie retains a
huge percentage of what Chandler wrote, making one almost wonder exactly what
the scriptwriters were being paid for) was terrific. Chandler professed himself
more than pleased with the movie's first three-quarters and with Bogart's
performance. I doubt whether he would have been quite so pleased with Altman's
movie; in fact I imagine he would have been at his most irascibly acidic about
it, just as he was about the arty camera-as-character treatment of 'The Lady in
the Lake'.
I know that Hawk's 'The Big Sleep' was what first led me to read Chandler, and
very much doubt that I would have felt similarly inspired if Altman's 'The Long
Goodbye' had performed that introduction. So in that way an off-centre
reinterpretaion of a fine book can do some damage, not to the book's intrinsic
qualities of course, but potentially to its finding of a deserved wider
audience.
I agree that a young Mitchum would have made a fine Marlowe - who never struck
me as being more than normally 'beat down' by the way. Well, I guess I had to
agree with somebody about something sometime, didn't I?
Patrick
________________________________
From: Kevin Burton Smith <kvnsmith@thrillingdetective.com>
To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thu, 2 September, 2010 22:16:02
Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: Name Changing, Re-Castings and Personality Swaps
On Sep 2, 2010, at 4:12 AM, Patrick wrote:
> despite Howard Hawk's comically racy liberties and the
> standard tacked on happy Hollywood ending, his 'The Big Sleep' is still
> essentially recognizable as Chandler's story in atmosphere, dialogue and
> character.
Despite all the differences they're "essentially recognizable" as the same?
Gotcha.
I'm not buying it, though. Especially when it comes to the hero's character.
Racy liberties, sexually charged banter and happy endings aren't a minor part of
the film, so easily swept aside.
Disappointingly, Bogart plays Marlowe more like a rerun of Sam Spade than as
Chandler's beat-down hero. The bittersweet, world-weary romance and crushed
idealism of the novel is given very short shrift in the final, released version
of Hawks' THE BIG SLEEP. The novel itself is much darker and disturbing, much
closer to noir.
I'm not saying one film is necessarily better than the other -- I enjoy both,
but I don't think either is particularly faithful to Chandler. Both
idiosyncratic directors used the novel as a mere starting point, not a
blueprint. Ironically, the almost universally derided Mitchum version of THE BIG
SLEEP (Marlowe goes to England!) is probably in some ways closer in tone to its
source than either Hawk or Altman's take. Assuming you can swallow Marlowe as a
tired old man sucking in his gut and muttering to himself a lot...
Mitchum shoulda/coulda been Marlowe in 1946. Me, I always liked Dick Powell.
Kevin Burton Smith
Editor/Founder
The Thrilling Detective Web Site
"Wasting your time on the web since 1998."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 02 Sep 2010 EDT