Cinema: Small Snooze

THE BIG SLEEP Directed and Written by Michael Winner

What a botch The Big Sleep is! First, it is an entirely unnecessary movie. Howard Hawks adapted Raymond Chandler's classic detective story 30-odd years ago and he did it right: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall played the leading roles and Chandler's essential mood, at once cynical, gloomy and absurdist, remained intact. As that film is available on TV and in memory's theater, there is no reason to try to duplicate it. There is absolutely no reason to rip Chandler's immortal gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, from his natural milieu, Los Angeles in its corrupt years as an emerging metropolis, and relocate him uneasily in, of all places, London.

Doubtless this decision had something to do with the new film's financing, which is British, but it is a disastrous one. There was an enthusiastic, obsessional air about the crookedness Marlowe used to encounter in L. A. The weirdos he kept turning up in his cases sensed that the American dream had newly relocated there, and everyone was feverishly intent on grabbing his share—getting in on the ground floor, as it were. Good, gray London hasn't been like that since Will Shakespeare's day—or anyway, Charles Dickens'—and the correlation between landscape and Chandler's characters simply does not exist.

And character is everything in Chandler's work. The plot of The Big Sleep is impossibly convoluted, turning ever more tightly in on itself as blackmail schemes keep multiplying. It represents a deliberate attempt by the author to cancel out, perhaps even parody, conventional detective story suspense. The idea was to hold the reader's interest with mood, dialogue and above all eccentric, not to say grotesque people. The fact that Writer-Director Winner has been more "faithful" to Chandler's story line than Hawks and his writers (among them, William Faulkner) is no virtue at all. What matters is being faithful to Chandler's singular vision, and that requires acts of cinematic imagination that are beyond the reach of the crude craftsman whose biggest previous success was Death Wish.

In earlier works Winner sometimes demonstrated a certain vulgar energy, but even that has congealed as he respectfully confronts this "classic," and he seems to have communicated only that to his actors. As Marlowe, Robert Mitchum seems merely weary. Sarah Miles and Candy Clark, as the rich, spoiled and sexy sisters who inspire so much greed in others, as well as James Stewart, Oliver Reed, Richard Boone, John Mills, Joan Collins and Edward Fox, as assorted villains, victims and cops, all seem to be doing turns in a variety show rather than acting in an intelligently integrated drama. The result is a movie that lurches unsteadily from scene to scene. The Big Sleep is just an other snooze.

−R.S.