The Big Sleep *** (1978, Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Richard Boone, James Stewart, Candy Clark, Joan Collins, Richard Boone, Edward Fox, John Mills, Oliver Reed, Harry Andrews, Richard Todd) – Classic Movie Review 742

Director Michael Winner’s 1978 reworking of Howard Hawks’s 1946 film noir masterpiece The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall makes the twin cardinal errors of updating the yarn to the Seventies and misplacing it like a duck out of water in London instead of California. And yet the 1978 The Big Sleep still remains highly intriguing and entertaining.

Though a shade too old now at 61, Robert Mitchum (reprising his role in the 1975 remake of Farewell, My Lovely) is pretty much near perfect as Raymond Chandler’s cynical anti-hero, the smooth, cocksure if shabbily down-at-heel private eye Philip Marlowe, making the role his own while never erasing the indelible memory of Humphrey Bogart from the first film.

Winner’s screenplay is no masterpiece, but it is very workmanlike and has the cardinal virtue of fairly carefully following the novel, though he has changed the character names, bewilderingly. But the authentic Chandler-style dialogue is still there, happily.

For example, Marlowe says: ‘All I itch for is money. I’m so greedy that for £50 a day plus expenses on the day I work, I risk my future, the hatred of the cops, I dodge bullets and put up with slaps and say “Thank you very much. If you have any further trouble, please call me. I’ll just put my card here on the table.” I do all that for a few pounds.’

Marlowe also says: ‘She’d make a jazzy weekend, but she’d be a bit wearing for a steady diet.’ And of course: ‘What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a stagnant lake or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep.’

In the story, when Marlowe is hired by the elderly and ailing General Sternwood (James Stewart) to deal with a nasty blackmailer with embarrassing, compromising pictures of his younger daughter Camilla (Candy Clark), Marlowe soon finds that the man, Rusty Regan (David Savile), has met his long goodbye with the help of two bullets. This involves Marlowe in an ever-increasingly taut and deadly game that includes several killings, being beaten up and a memorable love-hate relationship with Camilla’s married elder sister Charlotte (Sarah Miles).

Of course, more subtlety would be nice. Winner doesn’t seem to be quite able to trust the wonderful Chandler material, so, for more box-office appeal, he adds lashings of the gratuitous 70s-style sex, nudity and violence that was very much in vogue at the time. Of course sex and violence pervade the Chandler book and world, but it was all quite a little bit more subtle and just less gratuitous back then.

But this is still a pretty effective, exciting thriller, with Mitchum still effortlessly riveting and with engrossing performances from first-class players of the era.

Joan Collins (as Agnes Lozelle), Richard Boone (Lash Canino), Edward Fox (Joe Brody), John Mills (Inspector Carson), Oliver Reed (Eddie Mars), Harry Andrews (Norris), Richard Todd (Commander Barker), James Donald (Inspector Gregory), Colin Blakely (Harry Jones), Diana Quick (Mona Grant), John Justin (Arthur Geiger), Simon Turner [Simon Fisher-Turner] (Karl Lundgren), Martin Potter (Owen Taylor), Dudley Sutton (Lanny) and Don Henderson (Lou) are the key players, sadly most of them gone now. Farewell, my lovelies.

The Big Sleep is directed by Michael Winner, runs 99 minutes, is made by Winkast Film Productions and ITC Entertainment, is released by United Artists, is written by Michael Winner, is shot by Robert Paynter, is produced by Lew Grade (executive producer, uncredited), Elliott Kastner, Michael Winner and Jerry Bick, and is scored by Jerry Fielding, with Production Design by Harry Pottle.

The Sternwood Mansion was shot at Knebworth House, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, England. The London filming includes Holland Park, Kensington Gardens, Kensington and Putney, with other UK filming at Chorley Wood, Hertfordshire; the Ornamental Waters, Wanstead Essex; Turville, Buckinghamshire; and The Royal Harbour in Ramsgate, Kent.

Michael Winner, who died on January 21 2013, aged 77, was among the stars who were not honoured at the 85th Academy Awards’ traditional In Memoriam section on February 24 2013.

The 34 feature films of Michael Winner.

http://derekwinnert.com/the-big-sleep-classic-film-review-69/

http://derekwinnert.com/farewell-my-lovely-mitchum-1975-classic-film-review-740/

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 742 derekwinnert.com