A Film Canon

More than any other noir, The Big Sleep translates hard-boiled misogyny into a literal stance - a horror that imbues every woman with at least a potentially predatory gaze, necessitating a defensiveness so comprehensive as to incorporate various other prejudices (xenophobia, homophobia) into its ambit. For this reason, the romantic conclusion feels particularly contrived, especially since Bogart and Bacall's combative rapport has been so beautifully inflected towards a more sinister antagonism, albeit without ever losing its romantic overtones, epitomised by a scene in which he awakens, bound, expecting imminent death, only to find her placing a cigarette in his mouth. Nevertheless, this final contrivance is offset by the extent to which Hawks, along with screenwriters Leigh Brackett, William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, recognise the relative unimportance of narrative itself in Raymond Chandler's artistic vision, quickly complicating it to the point of extraneity, and so opening up room for atmosphere and dialogue to breathe. As with Murder, My Sweet and Double Indemnity, the former tends to stem from a mobile, panoramic vision of L.A., albeit one that is now translated into a more interior - and so doubly claustrophobic - register, such that the lushness of the city's variegated social topography makes itself felt primarily at the level of Carl Jules Weyr's spectacular production design, and virtually every outdoor sequence is in turn contained by the omnipresent rain. Similarly, Bogart intensifies Philip Marlowe, moving beyond Dick Powell's wry self-consciousness to a performance that only ultimately has himself as audience, and so beautifully encapsulates the theatrical solipsism of Chandler's original, as well as entirely fusing him with his own screen persona in such a way as to render the various subsidiary departures from his character - which are, admittedly, more frequent than in the earlier film - inconsequential.