"THE BIG SLEEP"........DOES IT MATTER WHO KILLED WHO AND WHY?

The Big Sleep (1946)   Everyone's favorite legends about this classic center around novelist Raymond Chandler and the screenwriters never fully untangling the book's astoundingly convoluted plot........

                Seriously......Robert Mueller and his investigative team would need an additional two years to figure out the 'who' and the 'why' of the book and movie's core mystery.......

                 Not that any of it matters, as far as the movie's concerned.

                 Why? Simple.......it's Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall......that's why.

                 Nobody watches this to guess who's responsible for the body count.......it's all about the white hot chemistry between Bogart and Bacall, their second pairing after 1944's "To Have And Have Not".......

                  In the process of becoming a permanent, real life couple, Bogart's middle-aged wisecracking private eye and Bacall's young, icy-hot temptress struck so many sexual sparks together, it's a wonder the film didn't burst into flames while running through the projector......

                  And we giggled at the thought of those Production Code censors turning various shades of purple while the stars engaged in a riotous, double-entendre conversation about horse racing.......(hint: they are most definitely not discussing the finer points of horse-racing, with Bacall murmuring ....."it depends on who's in the saddle...."

                  Favorite surprising scene:  We'd almost forgotten about the little bit where Bogart attempts to disguise himself as a nerdy bookworm........(asking the snotty clerk if they sell books, she snaps back at him, "Whaddya think these are....grapefruit?" 

                 Oh yes, we almost forgot......the mystery.  Hmm......loads of blackmail, some dumb bad guys who expend a lot of effort on killing each other.......including one slick sap who gets accidentally mowed down by his own minions.....(director Howard Hawks so loved that idea, he duplicated it in his John Wayne-Robert Mitchum western "El Dorado".....)

                  So much for the story mechanics..........this rarely happens,but the the sheer incendiary Bogart-Bacall pairing (along with the priceless dialogue from Williams Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman) renders the who-killed-who questions moot......and forever makes "The Big Sleep" a 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS.  To quote Bogart's line from "The Maltese Falcon".....it's the stuff that dreams are made of.