I watched this again the other day when it was playing at a local movie theater and I must say I enjoyed it far more the 2nd time(partially because I understood a good 90%-95% of the plot this time). I also never realized how much humor was in it before.
Anyway, a few things I got confused on(this movie has a lot to process).
Why was Geiger killed?
Did the younger sister(the one who gets drunk easily and calls Marlow “Cute” all the time) actually kill anyone? I got the idea they tried to pin a couple murders on her, but I’m not sure if she actually killed anyone.
I’m not sure anyone really knows the answer to those questions. Raymond Chandler himself (who wrote the book upon which the movie was based) apparently once said he had no idea what was going on in the movie.
It’s been a while since I last saw it. I should see it again.
The younger sister (about which Marlow says to the butler “You can wean her, she’s old enough.”) isn’t getting drunk - she’s a drug addict. I have a copy of the movie that has several scenes that were cut from the original release, but they don’t add much that I can tell - it is still a long, convoluted story.
Agreed, trying to take apart the movie to figure who kills whom and why is hopeless. Lessee if I remember.
First spoiler: Who killed Geiger?
Geiger was killed by Camino, IIRC, ordered by the night-club owner/gangster (I forget his name). Geiger’s assistant thinks Joe Brody killed Geiger, and that’s why he killed Joe Brody.
Second spoiler: who killed Sean Reagan?
In the book, it’s the Lauren Bacall character who killed Sean Reagan. The movie couldn’t do that, so they imply that it was the younger sister.
Well, not quite. Here’s what Roger Ebert says in his Great Movies column:
Some argue Joe Brody killed Taylor (whom we never even meet in the movie), but last time I saw the movie, I found it vague as well (like it really matters).
Don’t know how to do the black box. You’ve been warned.
Geiger is killed by Owen Taylor out of jelousy and Taylor is either killed by Brody or kills himself.
Joe Brody is killed by Geiger’s boyfriend
Geiger’s boyfriend is arrested.
Carmen (the pervy sister, not Bacall) has killed Sean Regan a while ago because: a) he rejected her and b) she’s nuts and has a drug problem.
Vivian (Bacall) and Eddie Mars know. Mars blackmails Vivian.
Eddie Mars’ wife had an affair with Regan. In order to avoid looking as if he killed Regan out of jelousy Mars hides her in the country guarded by Camino in order to make it seem as if Regan and his wife ran away together.
Brody’s girfriend finds out were Eddie’s wife is by accident. Her new boyfriend Jonesy contacts Marlowe in order to organize a meeting to sell the info.
Camino kills Jonesy.
Marlowe kills Camino.
Marlowe kills Mars by making him leave the house that is being guarded by Eddie’s own gunmen. Without recognising their boss they shoot him to pieces.
Marlowe throws Regan’s murder on Mars under the condition that Carmen will be put in a asylum/rehab.
Right by the end there is a line about Mars not recognising Carmen when he sees her in Geiger’s place that I don’t understand but I think this is pretty much it.
Two key plot points in the book are only vaguely implied in the movie, which makes a lot more sense if you understand them:
That mysterious bookstore of Geiger’s, where Brody worked, was a rental pornography business – like a modern adult-video store, except he was renting out books, illustrated with color lithographs of “indescribable filth.” Another difference is that Geiger’s business, in its time and place, was completely illegal, thus it had to keep up a front of being a legitimate bookstore (a better front than the Tudor Employment Agency!), and keep all its real merchandise in a back room.
Geiger was bisexual; he was the lover/exploiter of Carmen; and the young man Marlowe chased down after Geiger’s murder was another of his lovers, who had killed Joe Brody for (misplaced) revenge. The boy fought back when Marlowe caught him, but, as Marlowe said (more or less), “Pansies have no iron in their bones.” (In those days, of course, there were no gay-rights organizations to call Chandler on that point.)
Obviously, you couldn’t just come out and say either of these things in a movie of the period. In a book, yes, but not in a movie. Probably the contemporary audience was better prepared to “get it” from hints than a modern audience, which expects such things to be made more explicit.
Read the book, if you haven’t; it explains a lot of things that don’t really make any sense in the movie because the explanations were left out for one reason or another.
Okay, I’ve never seen the movie, but I’ve read the book, and I have a question about the movie that doesn’t really warrant its own thread.
So, I heard William Faulkner wrote the screenplay. Is this correct? I mean, I know Faulkner worked for Hollywood for a while before everyone realized that he was the greatest American writer ever (I suppose I should say IMHO here, but it’s not opinion, it’s fact, dammit!), but I have a hard time believing that Faulkner would write a plot that no one could make heads or tails of. Wait. I just thought about the first two sections of The Sound and the Fury, the Dewey Dell and Vardaman sections of As I Lay Dying, and most all of Absalom, Absalom! and I can completely get how he could write something that no one understands. But did he?
As Short Guy notes, it is correct. Furthermore, Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay for To Have and Have Not with Ernest Hemmingway. To the best of my knowledge, that’s the only movie ever made co-wriiten by two authors who won the Nobel Prize for literature.
You always hear about Faulkner’s writing The Big Sleep. What you never hear (because I don’t think anybody knows, although I’d like to be proved wrong) is how much of his work went into the shooting script.
People don’t bother to mention that two other writers also got screenplay credit. One was Leigh Brackett, already a noted pulp and sf writer, who would go on to write The Empire Strikes Back. The other was Jules Furthman who also, yes, got a screen credit over Faulkner for To Have and Have Not (Hemingway wrote the novel but did not write the screenplay as Labdad’s link shows) and had already put in 30 busy years as a screenwriter.
My sense of writing tells me that the two of them had far more to do with the way the jaunty script came out than Faulkner.
(The two of them also wrote the fascinating Rio Bravo).
And there may be more people involved. I believe it was true then that by Writers Guild rules only three names could be put on a script. I haven’t read the complete story of the making of the film, but I’ll bet that when all was said and done, Faulkner’s work would have made a good page.