The Big Sleep

​The Big Sleep is an outlier in the world of film noir. Like most good noir, there are Dark and Sinister goings-on, to include embezzlement, infidelity, gambling, and murder. It’s got it all, and then some: drugs and pornography also feature, somewhat rarer debaucheries than we’re accustomed to in the period. But there is also a lightness to the film, conveyed in part by Bogie’s irrepressible nonchalance. It is also, as has been frequently commented, a hash of a plot best consumed with giddy delight rather than forensic solemnity. We know the film is in effect two Raymond Chandler short stories cobbled together, filtered through a number of rewrites, including one at William Faulkner’s boozy hand. So The Big Sleep offers a pastiche-y, perpetual “What’s going on?” affect. It’s a beloved film, but a hard movie to take seriously, and in that sense a bit of a noir orphan. But I think there is something else going on as well, a critical gender confusion on which few have commented. Outlier in its genre it may have been, but it was rather more central to the broader culture of which it was a part.

The Big Sleep is one of the most sensual movies of the period, and not just because of Bogie and Bacall’s obvious on-screen chemistry. Howard Hawks, one of the masters, clearly intended the film to be sexy. Martha Vickers, who plays the younger of the two ne’er-do-well Sternwood sisters, the irrepressibly coquettish Carmen, nearly scorches herself off the screen in her first encounter with Bogie. One of the delights for me every time I watch this film is Bogie and Bacall’s eyes pawing at each other, checking each other out, elevator-eyeing each other’s bodies like hungry lions eyeing a fresh gazelle. (Seriously, make a drinking game of it the next time you watch The Big Sleep.) And of course there is the famous restaurant scene halfway through the film as our two lover-protagonists describe how they judge horseflesh at the track, in a barrage of double-entendre that would make a drill sergeant blush.

The humor, the star power, the unfollowable pastiche plot, and the eroticism have made it an audience favorite for generations but have also masked an important historical element that makes the movie a landmark and helps to account not only for its longevity but for Bogie’s enduring appeal.

The movie is sexy, but not because the men are men and the women are women. One of the themes rarely remarked on in critical commentary is the confused gender roles and gender expectations depicted in The Big Sleep. Every woman in the film seems to be out of control: drug addicted, gambling, sexually aggressive, real or potential murderesses the lot of them. Vivian admits she and sister Carmen are in need of psychiatric help. Every femme in this movie is fatale, and the men are hardly better. Most of the men—those that aren’t obvious anti-social brutes—are weak, incapable, or inert. All seem to be morally compromised. The strongest male figure apart from Bogie, Sean Regan, is absent the entire film. Such ambiguities may be cliché in the morally compromised worlds of noir, but The Big Sleep extends them to their breaking point.
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The gender confusion extends throughout, even to the supporting players. Take the taxicab girl, played by the uncredited Joy Barlow. I’m unaware of another female hack in any of the period’s films. She’s beautiful, and as the kids would say these days, clearly “down to clown” with Bogie’s Marlowe. She gives him her card and tells him she’s available anytime, day or night. But night’s better, she says with an inviting smile, because she works days. In this world where beautiful young women can be promiscuous cab drivers, what are the rules?

This is not just a world of morally obtuse angles. This is a world gone haywire, and it’s gone haywire in a very particular way. The women are out of control, the men are incapable of handling them, and all hell is breaking loose because of it.

Enter our hero. We see Bogie’s Marlowe now as a cool customer deftly navigating an increasingly intricate plot. But what gives him his particular leverage in this world is not his facility with a gun or his cocked right hand (indeed, he is often beaten up and restrained himself by the gangsters), but rather his ability to coolly navigate this world’s fast-changing gender norms. He is unmoved by Carmen Sternwood’s (Martha Vickers) sexy kittenish play, though we know he likes women—a lot. Every woman he meets in the film seems to fall for him. Yet unlike the lesser men in the film, he remains aloof from these entreaties because he knows they are not real. He understands the women in this world better than they understand themselves, a significant advantage in a world in which all the rules about proper behavior have gone out the window.

Bogie knows the rules and he can navigate them with ease. Nowhere is this in better evidence than in his first encounter with Agnes Lowzier (played by Sonia Darrin, uncredited), the (again) beautiful bookshop dealer’s assistant and Joe Brody’s apparent paramour. He needs information from her, but he instinctively knows that she would not be amenable to his manly flirtations. So he effortlessly takes a different tack with her, one that requires gender and sexuality code-switching. He becomes the lisping intellectual, the mincing, apparently homosexual, book dilettante. He can do this with a pair of glasses and the flip of the brim of his hat. His chuckle at the ruse’s success is revealing.

One of the fascinating themes of postwar U.S. history concerns the gender anxieties so clearly evident in a nation demobilizing from mass participation. The film is a snapshot of a postwar America unsure of itself and confused about gender above all. The Big Sleep, released in 1946, provides a fascinating window into this topsy-turvy cultural moment. Millions of men had served overseas but had returned home to uncertain roles and expectations. These themes are explored in any number of classic films of the period, from The Best Years of Our Lives to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. But it was a period no less confusing for what it meant to be a women. Where was Rosie the Riveter to go, what was she to do now that the war was over? Millions of women had served not merely honorably, but in crucially important roles. Millions had learned, many for the first time, about their own capabilities, their own power, and what independence might mean for their lives. And now, after 1946, prevailing notions about propriety increasingly said that Rosie was going to have to leave the factory and get back to the kitchen.

These themes are shot through the popular culture of the period, no more famously than in the ground-breaking postwar television comedy I Love Lucy. Every week for a half hour, Lucy Ricardo plotted, schemed, and cajoled her way to some sort of role for herself outside the family hearth. And every week she learned, to her dismay, that she was not suited for such work, that her best role was wife and (eventually) mother. The show played Lucy’s dilemma for laughs, but in American culture, getting women back into the home was serious business. Think of the mayhem that ensued when bombshells such as Marilyn Monroe were unleashed on an unwitting society. Not unlike Lucy, every one of Marilyn’s comedies had her safely ensconced in the bonds of marital bliss by the end of the sixth reel. The outside world was not safe from her otherwise.

The Big Sleep is part of this cultural reimagination. Bogie is successful not because he’s the toughest, or because he’s merely a survivor in an amoral world. Bogie, instead, is deeply enmeshed in this fast-changing, tumultuous new world. He can navigate its gender codes without fail, tough guy at times, intellectual queen when needed. The only time he becomes an unrequited ladies’ man, in the bookstore with the lovely Dorothy Malone, is—literally—during a rain delay in the plot. Just think how quickly he switches during the famous horse-racing conversation with Vivian Rutledge: one moment he is keeping up with her rapid-fire double entendre, the next moment he is exposing her duplicitousness. And she was NOT happy about that. One can almost see, within the movie, and certainly within the period of which it is such a conspicuous part, the cultural work being done to reimagine and renegotiate deeply-held beliefs and practices. In a few short years, American pop culture would tell us, the beautiful cabby-hacks would need, like Lucy or Marilyn, to return to their respective domestic spaces. This world was not for them.

Watch Bogie and Bacall's mid-afternoon flirtations here: the big sleep - YouTube

Further Reading: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. ed. (Basic Books, 2017); Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May | Hachette Book Group