There are literally thousands of shows streaming on hundreds of subscription services. So last night we chose to watch ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946) starring…well, if you read this blog you know who’s in ‘The Big Sleep’. This tells you both how culturally relevant I am (not at all) and what I increasingly seek in choosing what I view; I’ve seen ‘The Big Sleep’ at least a few hundred times over the years, so why watch it again? Because I already know I will like it and it will remind me of times in the past when I enjoyed it as well. A family limited world view, you might say,. To which I answer: go screw yourself.

Now, every time I see the movie I promise myself I’m going to concentrate on the wildly convoluted plot line and see if I can properly follow it–if it can even be properly followed. But, as always, I got distracted by the acting, the dialogue, the brisk and confident direction and the whole mise en scene. For many years, Howard Hawks liked to make it seem as if nobody involved in the film really cared about the plot anyway and that nobody–including the novel’s author Raymond Chandler–knew who killed ‘Owen Taylor’. But Hawks was a tall-tale-teller, an unreliable narrator when discussing his own exploits, and Todd McCarthy, Hawks’ biographer, shows definitively that a great deal of effort was expended on making the plot work and getting the gears to mesh. Problems arose when test audiences demanded more sexually charged interactions between Bogart and Bacall which were dutifully scripted, shot and inserted into the film. (They are, as anyone who knows the film will tell you, the film’s high points). This led to eighteen minutes needing to be excised from the movie in order to make room for the new scenes and keep the film at a proper running time. And what do you throw out when something needs to go? The boring stuff. So out went the expository stuff, in went the sexy stuff and who the hell cares who killed Owen Taylor anyway?

It occurred to me during last nights viewing that the Max Steiner score is both beautiful and problematic. It’s slathered all over the picture, leaving very little silence or mood–true noirs, as the genre developed, learned the virtue of no score at all at key moments (or just a radio playing in the background). Steiner points up every possible moment, using harps, timpini, strings, flutes and an awful lot of lush, orchestral horn arranging. Nonetheless, it gives the film a glammy, polished vibe that other noirs don’t aspire to and thus bridges the big studio star product with the future, post-war, dark and eerily quiet  noir world. Above is a very nice ten minutes of the Steiner score–there’s no ‘soundtrack album’ so the person who pulled the above together took extracts from the movie that didn’t have dialogue over it. It’s beautiful in its own right and even if it plays heavy on the picture it deserves a listening. Except for one cue. If you go to 55 seconds in, you’ll hear a ‘mystery motif’ that Steiner uses again and again in different forms throughout the film. It’s a sort of ‘what’s behind that scary attic door?’ cue and I don’t like it a bit. It’s silly, juvenile, a heavy-handed way of a composer explaining that the movie he’s scoring is a mystery. I don’t just not like this cue. I actively dislike it. In fact, to paraphrase Roger Ebert’s review of a different movie, ‘I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate” this cue. Though if you read between the lines you can see that, actually, I rather enjoy it as well…