January 02, 2003
The Big Sleep (1946)
[3 - Enjoyed it]I had not heard of The Big Sleep until a friend lent me a DVD of the movie. Within the first two scenes of the movie I had a great big smile on my face as I realized that I had been handed a true classic, and with that I mean a film with nuance and quality of the sort that you cannot find anymore.
For some reason modern moviemakers have decided that plots have to be hand fed to us, or worse shoved down our throats. Offer as evidence the climax to the modern favorite 'Titanic' where after a thirty minute long special effect ridden sequence of the ship sinking the writers felt it necessary for our protagonist to utter 'Hold on, the ship is about to sink!'. We loose sight of just how inane and poorly written most modern cinema is until you watch a movie that gives it's characters depth, intelligence and best of all good dialogue like The Deep Sleep. I guess that just as there are some cinematographic gems along with today's deluge of Hollywood crap, in 1945 when The Big Sleep was made it likely stood out as having a particularly good quality. It would stand to reason that only the good ones survive long enough to still warrant showing over fifty years later, yet watching this movie still had the definite effect of making me long for movies of subtlety and quality that seem conspicuously absent from today's repertoire.
Both Bogart and Bacall are simply a pleasure to watch in this film. The writing is top notch as is the filming. The significant drawback the movie has, and this is significant, is that the plot, while enchantingly intelligent and complex, teeters on the edge of incomprehensible from the beginning, then spirals off that dangerous edge as plot twist after plot twist demand that the audience keep close tabs on each piece of dialogue. I honestly cannot say that I fully understood the Deep Sleep. I did however greatly enjoy it.
One final thought: The chemistry between Bogart and Dorothy Malone (the Acme Bookstore Proprietress) in the short scene they shared was so rich and effective I thought the sparks that were flying might set something on fire. What I would not give to have that quality of acting in place of today's idea of making a scene sexy by stripping the actors and adding big beat music.
Posted by Leopoldo at January 2, 2003 06:51 PM | TrackBackThe irony is that movies like this were considered B movies. That's why they only warranted black and white. It's the musicals that got the color. The Big Sleep is good, but not one of my favorites, ie, I wouldn't purchase it. It amazes me, though, just going into Hollywood Video, over to the classics, and picking out any old noir film and I'm almost always very please. Even old films with Ronald Reagan.
My 3 Favorite Noir Films:
1) The Third Man
2) Maltese Falcon
3) Touch of Evil
I saw this link and it has a pretty good set of films to go through:
http://www.epinions.com/content_1038721156
Posted by: Nick on January 4, 2003 01:32 AMNo shit, really? I somehow assumed Noir films were getting recognized as top notch not as B films. Makes me wander what we count as crap today that may become a classic.
My 3 favorite Noir are probably
1. M
2. The Third Man
3. Touch of Evil
By the way I could not remember the name for M so I did a search on yahoo for Film Noir and found a great page with recommendations.
B films I think denote more what money went into them than the quality. Obviously there are truly B (or F) films like Ed Wood's painfully bad films.
Resevoir Dogs is a B film of our day. Few people saw it. Only film nuts really know much about it, and fewer would know anything if Pulp Fiction hadn't been such a success.
El Mariachi is definitely a B film.
Something like Memento, too. A lot of films that only make through the art houses are really B films. They don't get much money, don't make much money, and don't have much notoriety except later as they grow in critical estimation and their makers get more famous.
At least I think of those as B films. Hey I found a history and definition of them:
"The B movie was a direct response by Hollywood to the falling cinema audiences of the early Depression years. Where previously audiences had paid to see a single feature supplemented with shorts and cartoons, they were now treated with two features, one of which was a low-budget supporting film -insert the B. "
http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/b/intro.htm
I guess B films don't really exist anymore. And it's hard to say what were truly the B films back then, at least in technical terms (as in were they the extra film). But the closest thing today would be the art house, independent, and other low-budget films. And it seems reasonable to extend "B film" for our purposes to low-budget films on yesteryear as well.
So I think it's less about quality than what they had to work with.
Posted by: Nick on January 5, 2003 12:36 AMFor anyone who has seen this movie and enjoyed it, I suggest the book of the same name from which it is taken, by Raymond Chandler. Both works stand among their peers as creations of extraordinary subtlety and quality.
Posted by: heathcliffe on September 22, 2003 06:43 AM
