Story and voice: A post about The Big Sleep inspired by cold mutton fat
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
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Haunted by John McFetridge's comment about voice and story here at Detectives Beyond Borders and consumed by desire to revisit the greatest mutton-fat simile in American crime writing, I read The Big Sleep again on Saturday.McFetridge wrote "I think voice is really important in a story but not as important as the story," which sounds at once reasonable and at odds with the wisecracking American P.I. tradition that Raymond Chandler perfected for eternity. So I kept my eye on story this time, and McFetridge was right. The pathos of the story and the depth of the Sternwood family's pride and self-delusion get more affecting each time I read The Big Sleep.
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| Martha Vickers as Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep's best performance. |
Oh, and the novel's plot is less confusing than the movie's, if that matters.
© Peter Rozovsky 2015
Labels: Howard Hawks, Humphrey Bogart, John McFetridge, Lauren Bacall, Leigh Brackett, Martha Vickers, movies, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, William Faulkner
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 6:23 PM
17 Comments:
Peter,
I agree with R.T. It is the blend.
I love Chandler's novel "The Big Sleep" and I've reread it several times over the years.
I also like the film and I've seen it several times.
But I think James Garner best captured Chandler's character Philip Marlowe in 1969's "Marlowe," which was based on Chandler's "The Little Sister."
Garner looks much more like Chandler's Marlowe than ole Bogie. Garner is big, tough and handsome like the novels' character. Garner also smokes a pipe and is very good with the wisecracks. He has Chandler's voice down.
I only wish that the film was a 1940s period piece.
Have you seen the film or read "The Little Sister"?
I read that Chandler liked Bogart, but he really wanted Cary Grant. (Think "Mr. Lucky")
Chandler's friend Ian Fleming also wanted Cary Grant to portray his character, James Bond, on the big screen.
Paul
If you're interested, below is a link to the "Marlowe" trailer on youtube.com:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIgTl-rXmOk
Paul
R.T., well yes. An excellent novel will combine plot, setting, character, and so on. The test in this case is what you'll get if you ask someone to write a page in Chandler's style. I occasionally got the feeling reading The Big Sleep that Chandler would occasionally toss in the extravagant similes just for fun. Who says a writer has to be single-minded about his task? Who says he can't have a bit of a joke, too?
Paul, I have read The Little Sister, and what I remember most is how it was shot through with, and even marred by, Chandlers' disillusionment with Los Angeles. I'm reading The High Window now.
In re who would make a good Marlowe on screen, a Chandler-loving friend has expressed regret that Robert Mitchum did not get to play Marlowe when he was younger.
Peter,
Yes, Mitchum would have been very good as Marlowe when he was a young man.
He portrayed Marlowe twice as an older man.
A remake of "The Big Sleep" (which I didn't care for) and "Farewell, My Lovely (which I did like.
Mitchum was good as Marlowe, but, alas, he would have been great as Marlowe when he was a young guy.
Paul
The Farewell, My Lovely that included a young Sylvester Stallone!
Peter
Both are classics that I've read and watched into the double figures.
Some of my Big Sleep posts:
http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/search?q=the+big+sleep&max-results=20&by-date=false
warning for Peter his bete noir The Big Lebowski gets mentioned a couple of times...
Adrian: I finally tied my dissatisfaction with the Coen brothers to my dislike of pop culture references to pop culture. I almost never like passages in crime novels where an author writes something like "If this were a movie or a detective story, he would ... " And once I realized what the blowing hat in Miller's Crossing, my assessment remained precisely what it had been before: "What the hell is that nonsense with the goddamn hat?"
(I enjoyed the delicious understatement with which Rotten Tomatoes opens its discussion of the movie:
"Though possibly more notable for its distinctive style than an airtight story...")
And do you know offhand what the first crime story or movie to use The Big ____ in its title?
Peter
I dont. But I have used The Big Sheep a couple of times.
The Big Crock would be a delightful play on The Big Clock, if this degenerate culture of ours would recognize the allusion.
Peter
I'm guessing you havent been to an AA meeting, but if you ever do you might encounter The Big Book...
No, but thank you for sharing.
Peter, there is The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill, a short novel, short enough to be anthologized a few times, published in 1892, and also the first locked-room mystery. Really very good, not the least for having a measure of humour in it.
I knew Zangwill was, among other things. an early writer of mysteries, but I never knew any of them was The Big anything. Thanks.
I do think Zangwill's other writings and work of more interest than his mysteries, Peter. But 'tis a curiosity that The Big Bow Mystery was used as the basis for three movies, in 1928, 1934, and 1946. Clive Brook and Otto Kruger in the first two were significant actors, but 1946's The Verdict furnishes a link with the earlier part of your post, for that featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. A pity reviews of it are so generally discouraging, but still worth a look, I suspect, if one can find it.
Thanks. In another Chandler-related matter, if Zangwill knew Yiddish, he may have known the expression 'hoiche fenster,' or `high window,' used, apparently by lower-middle-class and poor people to refer to the houses of the rich.
I feel sure he did, Peter. The Big Bow Mystery was his only work of crime fiction, though a crucial one. But he was a fine and prolific writer in other genres from humorous newspapers pieces to studies of great literary figures. One of his plays was turned into a musical in 1979! But the work I'd like to get, a most famous one in its day, is Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar people, published in 1892. Add to all this his rather futile territorial campaign rather than for Zionism, and I think we have here a significant writer and thinker quite overlooked. One interesting thing he did here and there was express Yiddish sentence structure in English. I'd like to see that as well. I think first I'll take a look in Google Book Search.
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