I guess I'm just overly serious with no sense of fun. I am told that the appeal of Howard Hawks is that he makes jokey, tongue-in-cheek genre pieces, but I don't find them particularly funny or even that interesting for that matter. The Big Sleep is a based on a novel by noted crime writer Raymond Chandler, and has a screenplay co-written by William Faulkner, and Hawks seems to think the best way to handle this material is to treat only half-seriously, with no apparently theme or reasons for its existence.
The movie looks like a noir. It stars Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe, a private detective who is called by a millionaire (Charles Waldron) to locate some guy who stole some money from one of his daughters. I think. There's not going to be much more of a plot synopsis, because understanding the plot of the movie really hard, and according to some sources I've looked at, impossible. Apparently, people who have really studied this movie have reported that there is not actually enough information presented in the film to understand the plot twists. At any rate, the detached tone Hawks put into his film made it impossible for me to care.
The film is at its best when Bogart, perhaps the greatest movie star of all time, just gets to make sarcastic comments at stuff that happens to him. However, unlike Bogart's Sam Spade, I could never get involved with Marlowe because Hawks takes us out of the film to often with his postmodern tricks. Yeah, it's fun to watch Bogart and Bacall banter, but isn't it more fun if they were actual characters with something at stake, instead witticism for its own sake?
Since we can't care about the characters, and the story it makes little sense, most of the movie is just plain dull, and my attention began to wander at the 45-minuet mark, and I found myself wondering what exactly the merits of Hawks's works were supposed to be? Watching celebrities goof off in front of the camera? Even Robert Altman at his most deconstructed at least tried to come up with characters we could relate to and care about, and perhaps, relate his film to an actual idea, about politics, society or something.
I have to state that my objections with the movie have nothing to do with Hawk's competency as a filmmaker or his effectiveness at reaching his goals. It's clear that he made the film he set out to make, I just don't find that movie to have much merit, and certainly little artistic weight.
The Big Sleep (1946)