The Big Sleep

Howard Hawks brings Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe to the screen without ever quite untangling the plot. During production the crew realised nobody knew who had killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor. They wired Chandler about it, and as he later put it, he did not know either. William Faulkner worked on the screenplay. But the version people watch today was shaped less by writing than by a reshoot. The film was finished in early 1945 and Warner held it back to clear a backlog of war pictures, screening that cut for troops in the South Pacific instead. When Bacall's Confidential Agent flopped, the studio went back in January 1946 and replaced or altered about twenty minutes to push the Bogart and Bacall chemistry, adding a new restaurant scene and cutting a District Attorney sequence that had explained things. Chandler preferred the 1945 version, believing Martha Vickers as Carmen overshadowed Bacall and that her scenes were trimmed to protect the star. Who it is for: viewers who come for dialogue and atmosphere. Who it is not for: anyone who needs every thread tied off. This one refuses on purpose.