The Critics' Corner on THE BIG SLEEP

The Big Sleep opened to record business at New York's Strand Theatre, taking in $84,000 in its first week. It brought in $3 million in box-office rentals during its initial release, making it Warner Bros.' third-highest grossing film for 1946. It marked the seventh hit in a row for producer-director Howard Hawks.

"The Big Sleep is a violent, smoky cocktail shaken together from most of the printable misdemeanors and some that aren't -- one of those Raymond Chandler specials which puts you, along with the cast, into a state of semi-amnesia through which tough action and reaction drum with something of the nonsensical solace of hard rain on a tin roof. Humphrey Bogart and several proficient minor players keep anchoring it to some sufficient kind of reality." -James Agee, The Nation.

"Except perhaps for the showgirls in a Metro musical, there has never been assembled for one movie a greater and more delightfully varied number of female knockouts. But whereas Metro showgirls at least look content, every woman in The Big Sleep is feverishly hungry for love - and though every one of them would prefer Humphrey Bogart, they settle instantly for anybody." - Cecelia Ager, PM.

"In The Big Sleep, [director Howard] Hawks transcends the private-eye genre with his personal attitude towards apparently unmotivated violence as still another manifestation of the unnatural order with which man must cope¿The Big Sleep is notable for its gallows humor and its sense of hopeless enclosure within an ominous cosmos." - Andrew Sarris, "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet". "..it's the dialogue and the entertaining qualities of the individual sequences that make this movie....The action is tense and fast, and the film catches the lurid Chandler atmosphere. The characters are a collection of sophisticated monsters...All of them talk in innuendoes, as if that were a new stylization of the American language, but how reassuring it is to know what the second layer of meaning refers to." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies.

"In adapting the Chandler novel for the screen, many details were altered and the directly political material erased, but an essential pessimism and cynicism remained. An atmosphere of corruption was pervasive, and more than an investigation of a crime, this is an investigation into modern treachery." - Doug Tomlinson, The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers.

"...film contains the sharpest, toughest, wittiest, sexiest dialogue ever written for detective film...Hawks perfectly conveys Chandler's corrosive yet enticing Los Angeles." - Danny Peary, Guide For the Film Fanatic.

"If one had to select a representative of the dozens of thrillers produced in Hollywood during the Forties, one would turn instinctively to The Big Sleep, just as one would probably choose Raymond Chandler, its author, as the most characteristic crime writer of his generation...All the familiar Forties trademarks are there: a Max Steiner score that drowns even a thunderstorm as Marlowe tracks his man to a dingy house by night; the wide-shouldered girls (Dorothy Malone and Martha Vickers); and the sudden, chilling murders that catch almost everyone by surprise. The Big Sleep is professional movie-making at its best and at its most entertaining." - Peter Cowie, Eighty Years of Cinema.

"One of the finest mainstream noir-thrillers ever made...Hawks never allows the plot to get in the way of his real interest: the growing love, based on remarkably explicit sexual attraction, between Bogie and Bacall...the story is virtually incomprehensible at points, but who cares when the sultry mood, the incredibly witty and memorable script, and the performances are so impeccable." - Geoff Andrew, TimeOut Film Guide.

"Hawks has given story a staccato pace in the development, using long stretches of dialogless action and then whipping in fast talk between characters. This helps to punch home high spots of suspense, particularly in latter half of picture." - Variety Movie Guide.

AWARDS & HONORS

In The Encyclopedia of Movie Awards (St. Martin's Paperbacks: 1996), writer Michael Gebert named Lauren Bacall Best Actress of 1946 for her performance in The Big Sleep.

The Big Sleep was voted onto the National Film Registry in 1997.

Compiled by Frank Miller & Jeff Stafford