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.

Double Indemnity: The Noir Blueprint

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

A man staggers into a darkened insurance office in the small hours, wounded, and begins dictating a confession into a dictaphone for his boss to find. From that first scene we know how it ends — the narrator is telling us he is finished — and Double Indemnity spends the next ninety minutes making the certainty of doom feel like suspense. Billy Wilder’s 1944 film is the one everyone points to when they want to define film noir, and the reason is simple: most of the things we now think of as noir were either invented here or fixed into permanent form here. The voice-over confession, the venetian-blind shadows striping a guilty face, the femme fatale on the staircase, the ordinary man talked into murder by his own appetite — the grammar of a whole genre is in this film, working.

Raymond Chandler - vo.rs

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

Double Indemnity: The Noir Blueprint