The Big Sleep (Warner) is wakeful fare for folks who don't care what is going on, or why, so long as the talk is hard and the action harder. The message, if any, seems to be that the life of a private detective is ill-paid, full of social embarrassment, yet not without its compensations.
Author Raymond Chandler's hero Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) hires on to help a tough old millionaire out of a bit of blackmail. Before he even knows her, one of the old man's daughters (Martha Vickers), a thumbsucking type with beautiful legs, indicates her depravity by trying, as the detective says, to sit on his lap while he is standing up. Her elder sister looks like, and is Lauren Bacall (Mrs. Humphrey Bogart); she seems to be interested in buying Marlowe out of the case, either by fiscal or physical currency. Still another compensation (Dorothy Malone), after only a few minutes' talk about rare editions, pulls off her glasses, shuts down her bookstore, and spends the balance of a rainy afternoon drinking rye with Sleuth Bogart.
But such pleasures, like the ring on the merry-go-round, cannot be enjoyed at leisure. Marlowe's more serious work takes him to a glass-eyed bookseller's orgy-nest just in time to find him dead, with Miss Vickers, squiffed in a Chinese gown, giggling over the remains. He takes the heiress home and hurries on to watch a painfully inept blackmailer (Louis Jean Heydt) catch a bellyful of lead; no time later, Marlowe is kicking the killer in the face.
He has no sooner wound up a mild flirtation with a lunchroom girl than two men chivvy him into an alley and work him back & forth like a rockinghorse, one hammering at his solar plexus, the other at his kidneys. And he has hardly got his breath back when he has to watch a huge criminal (Fred Steele) force a small damp grey one (Elisha Cook Jr.) to drink a glass of poison. After that it is only a question of time before the big man has laid out Marlowe with a fistful of small auto parts.
The picture itself may give a clearer idea than all this of why such things happen, but only under the most patient analysis. Actually, the plot's crazily mystifying, nightmare blur is an asset, and only one of many. By far the strongest is Bogart, who can get into a minor twitch of the mouth the force of a slug from an automatic. Another is Producer-Director Howard Hawks's fellow feeling for the Chandler world: even on the chaste screen Hawks manages to get down a good deal of the glamorous tawdriness of big-city low life, discreetly laced with hints of dope addiction, voyeurism and fornication. A round dozen minor players help him out with great efficiency— not to mention Miss Bacall, who is like an adolescent cougar.
A Scandal in Paris (Arnold Pressburger-United Artists), based in a rather freewheeling way on actual fact, tells how Eugene François Vidocq (George Sanders), a criminal almost too clever for his own good, became prefect of the Paris police and turned his youthful research to gainful account as the first great detective (circa 1805).