The Big Sleep: The Plot Nobody Can Follow, and Why It Doesn't Matter

There is a story every film writer eventually tells about The Big Sleep, and it is true, which is the annoying part. During production in 1945, somebody on Howard Hawks’s set noticed that the screenplay never explained who had killed the Sternwood chauffeur, a man named Owen Taylor, whose car goes off the Lido pier early on. Hawks wired Raymond Chandler, whose 1939 novel the film was adapting, and asked him to settle it. Chandler, by his own later account, went back to the book and found that he did not know either. The murder had simply gone unaccounted for, and nobody making the film could reverse-engineer a culprit.

Most movies would collapse into that gap. The Big Sleep walks straight over it and keeps talking, and eighty years on it is still one of the most watchable crime pictures Hollywood ever produced. Working out how that trick is done is more interesting than working out who killed the chauffeur, and the two questions turn out to be related.

A plot built like a staircase with a missing step

Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories are famously constructed by accretion. A rich, dying old man, General Sternwood, hires Marlowe over a blackmail matter involving his wild younger daughter Carmen. That job opens onto a pornographer’s racket, which opens onto a second killing, which opens onto the disappearance of a man named Sean Regan, which opens onto the gambler Eddie Mars and his wife, and by the time Marlowe reaches the end he has passed through half a dozen small crimes that only loosely hang together. Chandler wrote his novels scene by scene, chasing atmosphere, and stitched the through-line afterwards. Sometimes the stitching held. Here it visibly does not.

Hawks and his screenwriters — William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, an unlikely trio — kept almost all of the incident and cut almost none of the confusion. What they understood, and what makes the film a better teacher than a tidier one would be, is that a detective story generates its pleasure at the level of the scene. Marlowe walks into a room, sizes up whoever is in it, trades wary talk, and walks out knowing slightly more. Repeat fifteen times and you have a movie. The audience is not holding the whole map in its head; it is enjoying each encounter as it lands. As long as every scene feels like a clue, the brain files it as progress, and the missing step on the staircase never trips you because you are watching your feet the whole time.

Bogart’s Marlowe is the anchor the plot can’t be

The reason the encounters work is Humphrey Bogart, in the second of the two roles — Marlowe here, Dixon Steele a few years later — that show him at his most controlled. His Marlowe is amused, tired, and permanently one step ahead of the room, and Bogart plays the intelligence rather than announcing it. When he pushes his hat back and needles a hostile clerk, or pretends to be a lisping bibliophile to case a rare-book shop that is really a front, the joke is that Marlowe is enjoying the work even when the work is dangerous. That enjoyment is the film’s engine. We follow him because he is good company, and good company can lead you down a corridor that goes nowhere and you will still have had a pleasant walk.

It is worth setting this Marlowe beside Bogart’s other definitive turn of the decade. In In a Lonely Place he plays a screenwriter whose charm curdles into something genuinely frightening; the same tight, watchful surface is there, but the current underneath runs cold. Marlowe is that surface with a decent man behind it. Watching the two within a year of each other is the best short course anyone could take in what Bogart actually did, which was far stranger and more precise than the trench-coat iconography suggests.

The film that got remade before it came out

The version most people have seen is not quite the film Hawks first delivered. Warner Bros finished a cut in 1945 and screened it to servicemen overseas, then held domestic release. In the meantime Lauren Bacall’s management, worried after a flop had cooled the heat from To Have and Have Not, pushed for changes. Hawks reshot and inserted new material through 1946, most of it built to showcase the Bogart–Bacall pairing that had made the earlier film a sensation, and it is the 1946 cut that went out to theatres and became the classic.

The two versions now sit side by side on the Warner Archive Blu-ray, and running them together is one of the most instructive things a curious viewer can do. The 1945 cut has more expository connective tissue — a scene that lays out the plot’s plumbing more plainly — and the 1946 cut throws some of that plumbing overboard to make room for the famous scene where Bogart and Bacall talk about horse-racing in language that is transparently about something else. The studio traded a little coherence for a lot of voltage, and the trade was correct. The added scenes are the reason the film is remembered. This is the whole argument of the picture in miniature: when incident and chemistry compete for screen time, chemistry wins, and the audience never sends a complaint.

Why it works: mood as the real subject

The craft lesson underneath all of this concerns what a film is about versus what it is doing. The Big Sleep is nominally about a chain of Los Angeles crimes. What it is doing is sustaining a particular register — night streets, rain, cigarette smoke, rooms full of people who are lying with style — for two hours without a slack patch. Sidney Hickox’s photography keeps the Sternwood mansion and the gambling clubs and the cheap flats all lit in the same velvety low key, so the film feels like a single continuous night even when days are passing. Max Steiner’s score prowls. The dialogue, much of it Chandler’s own similes ported over by the screenwriters, is written to be spoken by people who are performing for one another, which is exactly how these characters would talk.

That consistency of register is what covers the plot hole. A film held together by story logic falls apart when the logic fails. A film held together by mood only falls apart when the mood fails, and the mood here never fails for a second. This is the DNA that runs through the whole classic period — you can hear the same principle at work in the doom-soaked fatalism of Out of the Past, and in the clockwork cynicism of Double Indemnity, which unlike The Big Sleep has a plot you could diagram on a napkin. The three films make a useful triangle. Double Indemnity proves noir can be a perfect machine; Out of the Past proves it can be a mood poem with a machine buried in it; The Big Sleep proves the machine is optional as long as the poem holds.

The lasting influence sits mostly on the mood side of that ledger. Later crime cinema that prizes texture over clockwork — the shaggy, sun-bleached investigations of the 1970s, and every neo-noir that would rather you feel lost with the detective than ahead of him — descends from Hawks’s willingness to let a story be a little unsolvable so long as it stayed alive scene to scene.

Where to watch, and how

The Warner Archive Blu-ray carrying both the 1945 pre-release and the 1946 theatrical cut is the version to seek out; watch the 1946 first, the way audiences did, then the 1945 to see the scaffolding the studio pulled down. Do not, on a first viewing, try to keep the plot straight. Let it wash. The film is not testing you.

Spoilers below

Here is the honest reckoning with the mystery, for anyone who wants it. The chain of deaths runs roughly like this: Arthur Gwynn Geiger, the bookshop pornographer blackmailing Carmen Sternwood, is shot; the Sternwood chauffeur Owen Taylor is found drowned in the general’s car off the pier; the small-time crook Joe Brody, who had grabbed the compromising photographs, is shot by Geiger’s grieving associate; and later the frightened little man Harry Jones is poisoned by Eddie Mars’s gunman Canino, in the film’s best-sustained scene of dread, before Marlowe eventually corners Canino and the truth about Sean Regan.

Owen Taylor is the hole. In Chandler’s novel the implication — never confirmed — is that Taylor, who was sweet on Carmen and enraged by Geiger’s hold over her, shot Geiger himself and then either was murdered or drove off the pier in some untraced sequence involving Brody, who had been tailing him for the photographs. The film keeps the sweetness and the anger and drops the accounting entirely. The famous telegram to Chandler was Hawks’s crew trying to plug exactly this: did Taylor kill Geiger and then get killed, or kill himself, or was he murdered, and by whom? There is no answer inside the finished film, and — this is the part people forget — there is barely one inside the book.

The 1946 ending also rewrites Carmen’s fate to satisfy the Production Code and to keep Marlowe and Vivian’s romance clean, softening the novel’s bleaker resolution and shifting more of the final guilt squarely onto Eddie Mars. The effect is to convert Chandler’s cold, exhausted last chapter into something closer to a romantic thriller’s clinch. It is a compromise, and it works, for the same reason everything else in the film works: by the time you reach it you are watching two people who plainly delight in each other, and you have long since stopped keeping score of the corpses.

If the picture leaves you wanting the version of Chandler where the machinery is exposed and grinding, go from here to Double Indemnity, which he co-wrote and which withholds nothing. If you want more Bogart at full, unsettling strength, In a Lonely Place is the essential companion. And for a crime film built on the opposite principle — no mood, no romance, no cover for anything, just process and rot — The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the anti-Big Sleep, and worth the whiplash.