The Big Sleep (1946)
Howard Hawks' 1946 Chandler adaptation. Plot incomprehensible even to the screenwriters.
Actor: Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart spent the 1930s playing gangsters who die in the third reel, more than thirty of them, before High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon in 1941 changed his standing entirely. He was forty-one.
The persona that emerged is specific: a man who insists he is not involved and then acts on a principle he refuses to name. Casablanca is the purest version, and The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not and Key Largo work the same seam with Lauren Bacall, whom he married.
He won Best Actor for The African Queen, playing against type as a shabby drunk, and gave his most uncomfortable performance in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as a man disintegrating under suspicion.
He died at fifty-seven. The American Film Institute named him the greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema, which is a reasonable conclusion.
