A wealthy general seeks out hardboiled private eye Philip Marlowe to resolve his daughter’s gambling debts, but the case becomes much more complicated as people start getting murdered.

The Big Sleep or Chinatown? You decide

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now."

So begins the penultimate and most famous paragraph of Raymond Chandler's iconic first novel, The Big Sleep, published in 1939 and filmed by Howard Hawks in 1945 with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Death – Chandler's "big sleep" – pervades film noir and it pervades our first two offerings in Cinema@3St Peters inaugural international noir season. So much so that it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the corpses. One of the most famous anecdotes about the film is that Howard Hawks wired Raymond Chandler during the shoot to ask him whether the chauffeur was shot or committed suicide and Chandler replied: "Dammit I didn't know either."

Despite some loose ends, The Big Sleep works because it deploys the classic device of both detective fiction and films: the double plot. Private eye Marlowe is hired by General Sternwood to find out why his daughter Carmen is being blackmailed. (Marlowe on Carmen: "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.") Whilst he investigates and solves one mystery he is drawn into a darker and more profound mystery. Sean Regan, the General's friend and confidant, has disappeared and as an audience familiar with the genre, we guess that what the General really wants Marlowe to investigate is his disappearance. Marlowe does not disappoint, although it does not end well.

Chinatown was made in 1974 (almost thirty years' later) by Roman Polanski from a script by Robert Towne with Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston (who, of course, directed Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon). Towne won the Oscar for best screenplay in a year dominated by the Godfather II and, as the critics quickly picked up, he deliberately set out to pay homage to The Big Sleep. In an article in Sight and Sound originally published in late 1974 the critic Robert Monaco described the cinematic way in which he did so:

"Robert Towne has fashioned a knowing and loving homage to Chandler’s hero (and specifically to The Big Sleep) in Chinatown……Los Angeles – seedy, decaying, slow and hot – is the setting; the mood is depressive, sardonic, almost languorous; and, most importantly, the human relationships are superficial, abrupt and eventually seen as incontrovertible evidence of a pervasive and deep-rooted corruption of the spirit."

Chinatown also employs the double plot device. Set in the pre-war Los Angeles at the same time as The Big Sleep, Jake Gittes, a former cop, is haunted by the past when his beat was Chinatown. He is hired by a woman to spy on her husband, the chief engineer of the water and power department. As he investigates what seems to be a simple adultery case (“I’m in matrimonial work…..it’s my metier.”) - Gittes is drawn into a much darker and deeper mystery involving incest and corruption and, above all, water. (“Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.”) 

In The Big Sleep Hawks used Chandler's hero and his setting as raw material for superb scenes, crackling dialogue and the on-screen chemistry between his leading players (whom he had recently directed in Hemmingway's To Have and Have Not). Bogart with the General in the orchid house: "I seem to exist largely on heat, like a new born spider." Bogart in the bookshop with Dorothy Malone or in the car with Bacall: "I like that. I'd like more…..That's even better." Then there is the "racing" scene:

"Bacall:"...speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first. See if they're front-runners or come from behind... I'd say you don't like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the back stretch, and then come home free...." Bogart: "You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go" Bacall: "A lot depends on who's in the saddle."

Chinatown has more of the bleak, noir spirit of the original book. “Are you alone?” Jack Nicholson's private eye is asked “Isn’t everybody?” he replies. It is also more overtly political than The Big Sleep (which did not translate to the screen much of the corruption theme which underpinned Chandler's original book). When Gittes finally confronts John Huston's corrupt tycoon, Noah Cross, he asks: “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” Cross replies: “The future, Mr. Gitts, the future.” (He can never get Jake Gittes’ name right.) The film ends on a note of despair with a line which is almost as famous now as Chandler's original words with which we began: 'Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown!'"

Which is better? The Big Sleep was not a universal success when it was released and the version which we will see is not the original one which was made in 1945 but the 1946 version. Chinatown probably got the better press. The Guardian's film critic, Peter Bradshaw, said: "Chinatown is such a powerful piece of myth-making, a brilliant evocation of Los Angeles as a spiritual desert." The Observer's Philip French considered it a movie of "near perfection" ending "unforgettably". It is a more powerful film. But Nicholson's Jake Gittes would never have existed without Bogart's Philip Marlowe. You decide.