The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) begins with an entirely classic film noir thrust. An unseen guest, soon to be revealed as the film's protagonist, Humphrey Bogart, is greeted by a butler at the front door of a mansion. “My name is Marlowe. General Sternwood wanted to see me.” Immediately the audience is attached to Detective Philip Marlowe and for the rest of the film will ride alongside him into the dark and mysterious underbelly of crime that he ambles into. Born out of the anxiety caused by World War II, film noir is an interesting genre in that

“it is impossible to locate either in the films themselves or in the critical discourse surrounding them a set of consistent features usually attributed to the “classical” phase of noir: the hapless private investigator, femme fatale, gritty urban setting, convoluted story structures.” (Ebert 12-16).

It seems that it is much more a 'sense' of noir that one feels when watching that is requisite to recognising the conventions of the genre. The Big Sleep transcends to an even higher level of intricacy through the way it plays with and denies many of the established film noir visual, narrative and representational conventions. (Phillips . 10 -29)

Film noir is visually one of the most complex and identifiable film genres. It lurks in the absence of light, the dark of night, and the shadows of society. The Big Sleep utilises a number of the conventions that embedded themselves under the title of film noir during the 40s and 50s. However, it is important to note that the majority of the visual techniques used in film noirs are borrowed and are not enough on their own to categorise a film as a noir. Firstly, on the absolute surface, is the fact that The Big Sleepwas filmed in black and white. Though shooting in black and white would have been an obvious choice at the time, it was still a key element in the films construction, and there are clear indicators that it was used to deliberate effect. Filming in black and white by itself is a very stylistic exercise. It forces heavy contrast where normal colour photography would have far less. It emphasises objects in the light and buries everything else in the shadows. On a metaphorical level, low-key lighting works to show how the truth is being kept shrouded in darkness, as this is parallel to the narrative mystery in The Big Sleep and ...