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

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

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.

Howard Hawks - vo.rs

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