Cameraman Sid Hickox's wet, foggy night scenes make the film less noir than perplexingly grey and hazy, like the damp tweed of mobsters' overcoats. Few thrillers are as mesmerically dream-like, with Geiger's house – the false heart of the maze, to which the story keeps returning – forever sunk in mist and mystery, like a witch's cottage in a Grimm fairytale. The big sleep of the title may be death, but it may also be just slumber, and dream. The requirement of discretion often gives the film a surreal innocence: in the gambling den that Vivian frequents, she's found singing a jolly, faintly risqué number with the resident glee club. At one point, she's discovered in the house of Geiger the blackmailer adjusting her stockings in front of a Buddha's head containing a hidden movie camera – a scenario of insidious strangeness in the Max Ernst league. She's too much a tarnished innocent to be a femme fatale, but without a doubt she's one of the most intensely sexual presences in 1940s cinema – even if the discretions imposed by the Hays Code of censorship meant that Carmen's outré vices had to be implied, not named. As played by Martha Vickers, Carmen is, if not the louchest, certainly the most brattish vamp in film noir. "I assume they have all the usual vices," the General says of his girls, "besides the ones they've invented for themselves." The younger daughter, Carmen, seems too blissfully stoned on her own libido to invent anything new – she looks as if she's content to run through the old reliable variations. Marlowe plods down the mean streets of London as the plot grows more and more labyrinthine, and we plod with him.Based on Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel, The Big Sleep ostensibly recounts Marlowe's hunt for the shady characters who are making life a misery for one General Sternwood (a majestically desiccated Charles Waldron), father of two wayward daughters. The plot has Marlowe being hired by a rich, tired old military man ( James Stewart) to handle a blackmail attempt, track down some pornographic photos of his daughter, find his missing son-in-law, and, not least, provide him peace of mind in his dying days. Maybe the movie was intended as camp, but it comes off simply as an anachronism. Maybe people never really talked the way they do in a Chandler novel I’m sure they don’t today. “The Big Sleep” has been moved from the seedy Los Angeles of circa 1940 to the London of today, and that’s a mistake. But here, despite all the great costumes and sets and London locations they’re given to work with, the actors don’t seem engaged. It was directed by Michael Winner, who can hold our attention when he wants to (as in “ Death Wish”). The style in the new “Big Sleep” is confined mostly to three actors: Mitchum, Candy Clark and Richard Boone. What really matters in a movie like this isn’t plot, anyway, it’s style: How the characters talk to each other, and wear their clothes, and smoke cigarettes and hold guns. Chandler’s plot is so complicated that maybe Hawks was right in 1946 when he ignored the loopholes. And yet, when the movie’s over, we’re still mystified. We get Mitchum’s voice explaining things on the sound track, and we get flashbacks to remind us of key scenes, and when characters confess to a crime we get scenes picturing them. The movie isn’t a classic, but it does make sense. But now we come to the case of “The Big Sleep” (1978), with Robert Mitchum stepping into Bogie's shoes.
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