The Big Sleep

I finally watched this movie. Faulkner was one of the screenwriters, and he wrote this Bogart-Bacall flick in the "dark ages" of his career. He published Go Down, Moses in 1942 and wrote almost nothing until Intruder in the Dust, and it took quite a bit of cajoling to get him out of the funk that he was in during this period. In other words, Faulkner appeared to have resigned himself to the fact that he was not a writer, or at least not a writer anymore. He was well aware that people in other countries - notably Jean-Paul Sartre - considered him a great writer, and I'm sure that there was considerable bitterness there.

In this movie, The Big Sleep, Faulkner's touch is difficult to discern. He was not the sole scriptwriter, of course. Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman collaborated. I'm not sure about the details of this collaboration, though I might make that the subject of a later post. I really noticed some Faulknerian language/dialogue in the opening scene with General Sternwood in the greenhouse, with the "stink of corruption" and the description of the orchid. It was almost too heavy for the film, I think, and probably meant to be so.

I think it's interesting to wonder about the influence of this on Faulkner's writing. Many critics think that he fell apart as a novelist after this. His "major phase" ended by this time. Most critics put the end of this canonical period at 1940, with the publication of The Hamlet. Some extend that to Go Down, Moses. I think I've heard of one critic who considers Intruder in the Dust a major work, but that's the exception and not the norm. Intruder in the Dust became a film almost instantly, and was heavily promoted by Random House. It sold better than much of his earlier work, and it helped attract enough attention to get him the Nobel Prize two years later. It's interesting that it's not usually considered a "great work." It's a murder mystery not unlike Sanctuary; though considerably less shocking, it is not without some parallels.

I think it might be interesting to conjecture (and that's all that it is at this point) that Faulkner's Hollywood concerns, the War, and perhaps even the Portable Faulkner (published in 1946 by Malcolm Cowley) turned Faulkner away from the kind of work that made him a successful "great" writer in the 30's. Or, stated another way, the kind of writing that Faulkner produced after this interregnum (I think I like that word to describe this period) was not the kind of writing that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren would champion in the 50's.

There are a lot of things rolled up into that paragraph. Let me think about this and try to untangle some of the claims in there.

For now, here are some clips from YouTube from The Big Sleep:

Here is the restaurant scene added to the 1946 version after requests from Lauren Bacall's agent to cut an earlier, more chaste scene involving Bacall and a veil in Bogart's office:



Here's an earlier scene, just after the greenhouse scene:



And a lame reference to Proust:



The plot is a little (okay, a lot) mixed up, with several murders and murderers. I've also heard the story about Faulkner calling Raymond Chandler to ask him who the real killer was, and Chandler sounding offended and insulting Faulkner's ability to figure it out. According to one version of the story, Chandler later called back and apologized, saying that it wasn't clear and that he wasn't sure who the killer was either. So Faulkner had to make a guess, and Chandler (I think) seemed to agree.