LOOKING at The Big Sleep as an indication of Classical Hollywood’s noir style, the genre’s staples soon become quite evident. A quick-witted private eye (male, of course) attempts to solve a mystery, stumbles upon a femme fatale who tries her hardest to seduce him and lead him astray, and then solves the case all while shrouded in shadow and low-key lighting. However, over the years films like The Reckless Moment and The Big Lebowski have challenged this standard.
The following essay contains spoilers for The Big Sleep (1946), The Reckless Moment (1949), and The Big Lebowski (1998).
The Big Sleep introduces us to Detective Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) in a scene where Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers) almost immediately throws herself at him. Not too much further into the film a woman working at a store follows suit after talking to Marlowe for all of two minutes. As the stoic, powerful, and isolated male detective, Marlowe attracts the attention of nearly every female character in the film. In doing so, The Big Sleep illustrates the command Marlowe has over the situation at all times. That is in conjunction with his actual investigative abilities, which receive near equal screen time. If he is not flirting, he is probably making an incredible deduction so casually that you can’t help but be impressed. Marlowe’s character is the blueprint for classical film noir detectives, a mentally sharp and silver tongued man, capable of overcoming any obstacle.
The companion to any such character is the femme fatale. In classic noir, the femme fatale is the detective’s other half, and often serves as one of his greatest mental hurdles in solving the case. Although initially mixed in with all of the other women the detective may encounter, the femme fatale quickly stands out. Oftentimes she will be the one doing the seducing and lead the detective astray. She will have a power and strength of her own, but it will only serve the narrative in regard to the main detective. Over time he will learn to conquer her independence and become immune to her poison. In The Big Sleep, Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) fulfills this role, and does just as previously described. She seduces Marlowe, leads him into trouble, he overcomes it, and finally they ride off together.
Then comes The Reckless Moment, a film that begins to challenge the genre’s foundational approach. With her husband off at war, Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) must play the role of a protective mother and try to rectify the problem her daughter, Beatrice “Bea” Harper (Geraldine Brooks), creates when she accidentally kills a man. The Reckless Moment strips much of the agency away from the male characters. The one doing the investigating is a woman who currently has no husband figure in her life to lean on. She does the negotiating on her own behalf, deals with the police, and tries to scrounge up enough money to satisfy an attempt at blackmail. The Reckless Moment changed the classic noir structure to allow women to be the ones in control of the narrative.
The Big Lebowski further dilutes the original noir style and injects its own changes. Now the male detective has lost his motivation and wit, merely stumbling upon the correct answers. Maude (Julianne Moore) controls her father (introduced as a wealthy figure) through an allowance and uses The Dude (Jeff Bridges) to get herself pregnant. She does all of this without serving the plot, only acting as another attraction for The Dude until the film’s conclusion, where nearly no real progress has occurred since the opening scene. In this iteration of the noir, the male detective has lost his edge, the femme fatale only serves herself, and there is no grand reveal or prize at the end of the mystery.
Over the years the Classical Hollywood film noir has undergone many alterations. Once a genre near solely dedicated to showing off impressive male characters and their glory, it has now opened up. Women are detectives, male sleuths are lazy and bumbling, femme fatales are independent from the investigators, and the big reveal at the end takes a back seat to the journey. None of these changes completely replace the original format, but they open the genre up to a wider variety of stories, allowing more voices to shine and for greater artistic flexibility in the way films tell these tales.
