First released in 1946 and now being revived for selected screenings around the country and an extended run at the National Film Theatre, The Big Sleep is a film of infinite interest. In its famously knowing trailer, Humphrey Bogart walks into the Hollywood Public Library and asks for “a good mystery like The Maltese Falcon“. A librarian gives him a copy of what is misleadingly described as “Raymond Chandler’s latest”, adding: “What a picture that’ll make!” Well, it did, and the result can be approached from a number of distinct and complementary directions.
First, it’s a Warner Brothers production, made at the height of Hollywood’s big studio era and announced by Warner’s logo, which looks like a federal badge of social responsibility. Jack L Warner, who’d headed the studio since the early 1920s, determined what films were made, how and by whom, their cost and which contract performers appeared in them; their smart, stocky, wisecracking heroes looked a lot like Warner himself.