THE BIG SLEEP
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Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler! On this day you were born 116 years ago.

Chandler was born in Chicago but raised in England after his alcoholic father abandoned the family. As a boy, he studied everything from the classics to divinity. He eventually became a naturalized British citizen and after several years spent working for UK newspapers, he moved back to the States, settling in Los Angeles. For the next 20 years, he worked a variety of jobs, getting fired from nearly all of them. He also served in World War I, but with the Canadian Infantry Brigade.

It was not until 1933 that he published his first novella, “Black Mask.” He achieved enough success to spur more writing, usually along the lines of pulp fiction. Thanks to his growing popularity, he was hired in 1943 to work with Billy Wilder on the screen adaptation of “Double Indemnity.” He discovered a knack and enjoyment of screenwriting and turned out a bunch of them, including “The Blue Dahlia,” “The Lady in the Lake,” and “Strangers on a Train.”

One of his greatest successes sprung from his first novel, “The Big Sleep.” For the film version, director Howard Hawks called on William Faulkner and Jules Furthman to bring Chandler’s characters to life. Their task was formidable because the novel was a cynical, down and dirty look at all manner of vices.

Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is a private eye hired by a rich colonel to put an end to a series of blackmailing. The Colonel has two beautiful but ill-behaved daughters who manage to get into a lot of trouble. One is being blackmailed for gambling debts and the other for promiscuity. By the time the film ends, there are five dead bodies and one budding romance between Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall). The rest, famously, is a confusing — albeit gripping — plot. A story goes that during shooting, Humphrey Bogart asked director Howard Hawks whether one of the characters was killed or committed suicide. Filming stopped when Hawks realized that he didn’t know. He cabled Chandler, who wrote back, “Damnit, I didn’t know either.”

In fact, the making of “The Big Sleep” could be an entertaining film itself. Bacall and Bogart, having starred together in “To Have and Have Not” (also directed by Hawks) had to go back and re-shoot a number of scenes because Bacall’s agent realized that the woman playing her sister, Martha Vickers, stole every scene she was in. Hawks and the writers added some scenes between Bogey and Bacall, including a memorable verbal jousting about horse racing. On the film’s DVD, you can see the original version, replete with more Martha Vickers and less Lauren Bacall.

Unlike most detective films, “The Big Sleep” isn’t full of car chases or guns going off. Most of the joy of this film is in the dialogue. It is one of the most cleverly written films, and as shot in black and white, it perfectly captures the world of Raymond Chandler.

In the 1950s, Chandler turned more to the bottle than the typewriter and completed only one more novel. He endured a love-hate relationship with Hollywood, once noting that it had “all the personality of a paper cup.” He also claimed that “if my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.” Filmgoers are thankful he came, no matter what the reason.