A Sleep Too Big

Remaking a classic film is a tricky business, more often than not producing inferior works, such as 1978's The Big Sleep. Based on the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel, it was made into a classic film noir in 1946 starring Humphrey Bogart. The 1978 version stars Robert Mitchum, a noir leading man of equal calibre to Bogart. Yet director Michael Winner creates a film with lethargic performances by normally great talents.

There is exactly one quality in which this film surpasses the '46 version, and that's in its inclusion of nudity. I'm not just being a pervert here. There's a scene in which the detective protagonist, Philip Marlowe, comes across a young woman, a daughter of his client, naked in front of a camera, the resulting pornographic pictures becoming a source of blackmail that motivates the actions of various characters throughout the story. The Hays' code in 1946 prevented the actress from appearing naked in the film. Howard Hawks decided to film it exactly as though she were--except she's actually wearing a cheongsam. So the implication then is that pictures of her in a cheongsam are being used for blackmail. It doesn't make any sense and it's a problem. However, performances by Bogart and Lauren Bacall and Martha Vickers, a screenplay by William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett, and Hawks' direction made the movie a classic anyway.

Martha Vickers gives a much better performance than Candy Clark as the younger Sternwood daughter, who does look good naked but plays the character as so broadly mentally disturbed it seems a parody. It also drains a lot of the flirty energy from the film, but most of that is actually sapped by Mitchum, a 60 year old playing a man in his late 30s. I'm not one to say a man in his 60s can't have chemistry with a woman in her 20s (don't give me the ridiculous modern line about "power imbalance") but in this case Mitchum shows all the magnetism of a grandfather falling asleep while reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And I like Robert Mitchum!

Joan Collins is in the film and is about as somnambulant. She keeps her accent, more or less, because the story was moved to England from the original novel's LA setting. Why? It becomes more and more puzzling as more and more characters who just happen to be Americans are introduced.

Marlowe, of course, is American. Mitchum had hazarded an Irish accent in Ryan's Daughter a few years before but I guess this wasn't enough to induce Winner to call on Mitchum's capacity for accents, such as it was. Then General Sternwood is played by Jimmy Stewart, the best performance in the film, though he's only in two scenes. It's a little unlikely that Marlowe, an ex-GI, became a private detective in London after the war, but we're also meant to think Sternwood is an American general who retired to an English ancestral manor complete with servants and a vast collection of family portraits. So both his daughters are also American. If that's not enough, Canino, one of the villains, is American, too, with absolutely no explanation. He's played by Richard Boone.

Aside from Collins, the noteworthy English actors include Oliver Reed and Mitchum's Ryan's Daughter co-star John Mills. They're so few, it would've made more sense to set the story in LA and make them the foreigners. John Mills as a Scotland Yard detective also has only two scenes.

So, yes, despite the nudity, I'd still recommend the 1946 version. Or The Big Lebowski in which the pornography blackmail subplot also makes sense.