Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 48

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Popular Culture Review

this is comparable to Casablanca,... If anything, this one moves faster than the
other.... Its romantic interludes are more on the torrid side....Bacall delivers a
performance which will catapult her to certain stardom.”'^
“ My, my, my. Such a lot of Guns around Town and so Few B rains”
At age 51, hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler wrote The B ig Sleep —
the first of four masterful detective novels creating an atmospheric milieu of Los
Angeles— over three months in 1939 while residing in the City of Angels. The
mystery story was a moody, brilliant labyrinth of the shady exploits of hard-boiled
detective Philip Marlow navigating through a complex and duplicitous world of
decadent estates, corrupt crime, menacing cops and lethal women in order to solve
a case for his dying client, elderly father of two wild, beautiful daughters embroiled
in an unsavory blackmail/murder ring. By March 16, 1939 Chandler wrote of his
desire to “make enough” to “move to England and to forget mystery writing...if
there is no war and if there is any money.” World War II clearly preempted
Chandler’s plans and instead provided a “machine-gun burst of creativity” in
completing four of his best mystery novels {The B ig Sleep, F a rew ell M y Lovely,
The H igh Window and The L ady in the Lake) between 1939-1943, in adapting the
screenplay for D ouble Indemnity and writing The Blue D ahlia in early 1945 while
living in wartime Los Angeles.-^ Remarkably The Big Sleep got only four reviews
in 1939 and Chandler’s books were out of print by the mid-1940s; it was his
Academy Award-nominated script for D ouble Indemnity that revived interest in
Chandler’s novels, spreading his reputation by word of mouth. (Soon after, RKO
produced Farewell, M y L ovely as M urder M y Sweet, Hawks and Warner Bros,
produced The B ig Sleep, MGM produced The L ady in the Lake and Paramount
hired Chandler to write an original screenplay The Blue D ahlia.)
It was on September 20, 1943, as Wilder and Chandler completed the
script for D ouble Indemnity and Breen okayed the project for production, that
publisher Alfred Knopf published the paperback version of The Big Sleep. As Double
Indemnity was released, Steve Trilling’s August 2, 1944 memo to Colonel Jack
Warner noted Hawks’ effort to acquire the rights to Chandler’s The B ig Sleep, a
“highly censorable detective yam which, like To H ave and H ave N ot, presents
grave problems in adapting” the screenplay for Bogart and Bacall.^' Hawks sent a
memo to Roy Obringer regarding The B ig Sleep deal on August 28, 1944." By
August 29, 1944, Hawks secured the rights to Chandler’s B ig Sleep for $20,000,
with Bogart to star in the picture, and requested $80,000 from Warners to direct
and $55,000 to sell the story and completed scenario to the studio with a $20,000
advance as an option to buy the rights. The script was submitted to the PCA on
September 26, 1944, with Breen haggling over reducing the violence, liquor and
sex in the story through October, when Shurlock intervened and phoned Hawks.-^