Excerpt from our noir issue: Elizabeth Cantwell on The Big Sleep:
“Watching The Big Sleep, I find myself amazed and entranced by the way the film translates Raymond Chandler’s words into images. I don’t love Chandler for his stories, even the love story parts of his stories—I love Chandler for the way he manipulates words. His stunning, weird analogies and metaphors. The way he sees the world—through a lens of contradictions, juxtapositions, and death. Take, for example, a description from the beginning of the novel of the greenhouse in which Philip Marlowe first encounters the old Mr. Sternwood:
"The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.”
Stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. Now that’s an image. And somehow, Hawks and Faulkner and the others working on this film manage to convey that. As Marlowe (Bogart) walks out of the Sternwood’s greenhouse in the opening scene, we see a large patch of sweat soaking through his shirt. Sure, this may be a quick film, a rapid film (it feels almost like shotgunning Chandler at times), but it’s not a clean film at all. Marlowe lives in a dirty world. And we feel that right from the start.
In fact, I’d say that this isn’t so much a love story at all, but a death story. A story of mortality, of the ways passion can end up in a pool of blood on an oriental carpet. A story of decay. Decline. An L.A. story.“
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