The Big Sleep - making sense of the plot

Cafe Society
1

This 1946 Bogart-Bacall film is notorious for a plot that doesn’t seem to make sense. However, after viewing it many times, I think I have most of the plot points covered below. Needless to say, major spoilers.

Carmen Sternwood is writing IOU’s to Arthur Gwynn Geiger for drugs. Geiger sends these to her father (very rich and very old General Sternwood) in an effort to collect on them. On at least one occasion, when Geiger has given her drugs, he attempts to take lewd photos of her while she is high.

Geiger’s main business is selling or renting pornography to otherwise respectable people, but this also gives him an in to blackmail them later. This information is contained in the code book that Marlowe gets from Geiger’s house.

The Sternwoods’ current chauffeur (whose name I forget, sorry, he never appears onscreen except for his running feet) is really in love with Carmen, and shoots Geiger to protect Carmen from him, while Carmen is high and being photographed. He then takes the photos and gets away in a Packard belonging to the Sternwoods, but is followed by Joe Brody (he just happens to be there too, along with Carmen and Marlowe), who catches up to him, takes the photos and kills him by sapping him and running him off the Lido pier in the Packard. Marlowe gets into the house too late to see much, except that Carmen is high and scantily dressed.

Geiger had an implied homosexual relationship with a young man named Carol Lundgren, described by a character in the movie as his “shadow.” After Marlowe leaves Geiger’s house, Carol hides Geiger’s body for some unrevealed reason, and later lays it out as if for burial on Geiger’s bed, again for an unrevealed reason. Carol is seen working with Brody to pack up the dirty books the day after Geiger is killed, but later the same night apparently decides that Brody must have killed Geiger, and himself shoots (and presumably kills) Brody.

In the meantime, about a month before, gambling house owner and racketeer Eddie Mars kills Sean Regan, paid companion of General Sternwood, because Regan was in love with Mars’ wife. To cover this, Mars makes his wife hide out in the country so it will seem that she and Regan ran off together. At the same time, he convinces Carmen’s sister, Vivian Rutledge, that Carmen killed Regan because Regan rejected Carmen’s advances and that always makes her (Carmen) mad. This puts Vivian under Eddie Mars’ thumb, and helps keep suspicion off of him for the killing of Regan.

This last paragraph is the main plot point that is only touched on in passing as Bogart and Bacall make heat in the final scenes. There are other plot points that, even when laid out here, make no sense (Carol’s behavior, for example). There are smaller questions, such as why does Marlowe use a cab to tail Brody and the books back to Brody’s apartment? Surely he went to the bookstore in his own car and could have tailed just as easily in that, since no-one was familiar with his car. Also, where was Elisha Cook’s character (Harry Jones) before Brody was killed.? He is in love with Agnes, who is with Brody in the early part of the film, but once Brody is dead, here is Harry trying to help Agnes get out of town, and giving up his life to save her.

So, did I miss any plot points here? Did I get anything wrong? I feel like I could publish a monograph on this movie, if anyone were interested enough to read it.

2

How would the Sternwoods’ chauffeur know what Geiger was doing to Carmen; I doubt that she invited him in to watch. But if he really was in love with Carmen, and she didn’t know it, he would be taking an interest in what was happening to her, and seek to protect her. But if he kills Geiger to protect Carmen, and takes the photographs with him when he leaves, why doesn’t he take Carmen, too?

Mars kills Regan, and then makes his wife hide out to look like they ran off together. Why does he want people to think that? Would it really throw investigators off his trail? And why does the wife go along with this?

Why would Mars want Vivian under his thumb, and why would Vivian go along with it? It’s one thing to tell Vivian that Carmen is a murderer, but without evidence he has no leverage against Vivian. He can say Carmen is a murderer, but she won’t be arrested just on Mars’ say so.

And Mars’ two stories don’t mesh. If he tells some people that Regan ran off with his wife, and tells other people that Regan was killed by Carmen, anyone who starts investigating will know that something ain’t jake.

You’re right that there’s a lot to unravel about it, and it would be fascinating to see someone try. But I think the inscrutable plot is one of the movie’s charms. I found it frustrating the first time I saw it, but I started liking it a lot more when I could let go of that and just appreciate the interactions and dialog. I think the loose ends are deliberate on Chandler’s part. And for a movie that’s so stylized I think the confusion is more realistic. Do real detectives ever know all the answers about who did what, and why?

3

Carmen did kill Sean Regan. Carmen would go homicidal whenever men rejected her advances, including Marlowe when he kicked her out of his bed (remember she wanted her gun back). It’s why he tells Vivian that she’ll have to be committed (sent away). Most of the story was the plot to cover-up Carmen’s crime, mixed in with her other shenanigans.

4

At least it was easy to work out that Lauren Bacall was hot.

:wink:

5

I assumed that he either drove her to some of these drug session himself, or followed her like this time. After he killed Geiger, he was calm enough to get the film out of the camera without spoiling it and put the camera back in the statue, but then panicked and ran out. No, not very consistent behavior.

He told his wife some story? Anyway, she is clearly a loyalist with blinders, and would believe anything he told her.

I think he must have had some kind of evidence, probably fake. Vivian wants to protect her sister at all costs. As for the two stories, I can think of a way to make them sort of work. He tells his wife that Carmen killed Regan but the police will think it was him (Mars) who did it, so she needs to go into hiding for a while to throw them off the scent. (In the book, I think Marlowe actually follows the false trail to Mexico trying to find Regan, or maybe that was in the 1978 movie, or maybe I made it up.) I’m not sure why Mars wanted Vivian under his thumb, maybe because she would inherit a lot of money when her father died, which appeared to be fairly imminent. And also as part of the smokescreen to cover his own guilt.

I don’t think you can blame Chandler for this mess, he does a better job in the book (if I remember correctly) of having things make sense. I think it was studio expedience to blame.

I think she needed to be hospitalized for her drug habit and for being a nut case about men. If she had done it, most of Eddie Mars’ behavior is completely inexplicable. Why would his hit men been so hot to a) beat Marlowe up to get him off the case, and b) kill him to get him off the case? Why would Mars have tried to set up Marlowe to be killed at Geiger’s house at the end? Why would he have cared about any of this? He had to have done it (or more likely ordered it done).

6

Raymond Chandler is rumored to have told William Faulkner that he didn’t know some of the details of the plot.
Doesn’t Vivian Rutledge tell Marlowe that Carmen killed Sean and she put him in the well?

7

There was a murder, I want to say involving the chauffeur or a missing car, that can’t readily be tied to the overall story. I am pretty sure that is what Chandler was talking about. Still, it is a good book and a classic movie.

8

Yes, I heard that story, too. They filmmakers actually called Chandler during the filming and asked “who killed [the chauffeur?]”? He thought about it and realized even he didn’t know.

9

The chauffeur killed himself. He was in love with Carmen, but failed to protect her from her own self-destructiveness. He killed Geiger to retrieve the pictures of Carmen posing nude while in a drug-induced stupor, then lost them to petty thug Brody, who bopped him on the head and stole them. Humiliated, and guilty of murder, he drives straight off a pier, and drowns his sorrows in the Pacific Ocean. Chandler must have been drowning his own sorrows in something else if he forgot that!

10

I thought Carmen killed him.

11

IMO, the best way to enjoy The Big Sleep is to read the book (ideally in one sitting), then watch the movie.

12

When Marlowe finds Carmen, she’s whacked out of her skull on ether. It takes him a few minutes to get her on her feet; Owen would have been too panicked to take the time, and on the off chance she were discovered at the crime scene (by someone other than Marlowe), it’d be pretty obvious she didn’t shoot Geiger. This is more obvious in the book, where Carmen is stark naked as well as stoned, and Marlowe has to get her dressed before he can take her out of there.

Mars isn’t telling two stories. Publicly he’s maintaining that Regan and his wife ran off together, so that no one will think Regan is dead and start a murder investigation. Presumably, after a few months, he’d bring his wife home with the story that Regan dumped her for someone else. He knows Carmen actually killed Regan but he’s keeping that story to himself to maintain leverage over Vivian.

This is largely accurate except I don’t think it’s made clear Taylor’s death is a deliberate suicide. It sounded more like he was driving away from Joe Brody, dazed from the blow to the head he’d received, and lost control of the car.

That’s exactly the reason. The general is a wealthy man and Mars is counting on blackmailing Vivian for a sizable sum once she inherits her dad’s estate.

13

I recall that his police friend tells Marlowe that the hand throttle was set wide open.

14

This has a certain appeal, but it would mean that Brody’s story was off (about bopping Owen “way up somewhere on Beverly”) because Owen wouldn’t have been able to drive himself all the way down to the Lido pier. And why would Brody tell the truth about everything else, and lie about that detail? Finally, as carnivorousplant mentions, if he wanted to kill himself he wouldn’t have needed to set the hand throttle open, he could have just pressed the gas pedal.

15

Was the hand throttle 1945 cruise control?

16

I like that you started this thread. I read the book many years ago and had to read it a few times again before I was sure I didn’t understand it all. I haven’t seen the film.

17

I’ve never driven a car with a hand throttle, although my parents’ '49 Chevy might have had one (I don’t really remember). I think it is something that is used usually when the car is out of gear, that helps it to get started and warm up. So theoretically someone could set the hand throttle at halfway to maximum, and then put it in gear, and it would go forward until it hit something.

18

Great movie, but it makes even less sense than 2001. Some wonderful lines, though: “She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.”

19

Yeah. In the novel is it “She tried to sit in my lap. I was standing up at the time.”?

I didn’t understand the film 2001 until I read the novel.

The ape discovers a weapon. “He did not know what he would do with this new thing, but he would think of something.”
As the Star Child approaches Earth, “He did not know what he would do with this new thing, but he would think of something.”

20

In the novel it’s just, “Then she tried to sit in my lap.” A lot of the dialogue was invented for the film, most notably the horse-racing banter between Marlowe and Vivian.