Don’t think too hard about the plot of this classic hard-boiled detective film. It confuses everybody. Raymond Chandler’s original novel is so convoluted that when the film’s screenwriters asked him to clarify a hazy plot point (production on the film stopped for two days over it), the author himself was stumped. The novel is nevertheless a classic because Chandler’s prose reads like a bullet that cuts a clean path across 200-plus pages. The 1946 film version is similarly loved for reasons that have little to do with its plot. Chandler’s novel is a house of cards and screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman do their best to keep it standing, while director Howard Hawks gladly allows it to fall.
Hawks knew that when you’ve got Humphrey Bogart, the movies’ greatest embodiment of a hard-edged private eye, you don’t need a perfect plot. As Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, Bogart is as lost in that story’s web of double-crossings as much of the audience is. He’s just trying to stay alive and out of jail and we follow him with rapt attention. We like the way he walks into traps and then smirks in the face of danger like no one else in the movies. And we like the way he does it all over again here as Phillip Marlowe.
Hawks also knew that when you’ve got Bogart and Lauren Bacall together for the first time since To Have and Have Not, you can pretty much forget the plot sometimes as long as the couple get a few steamy moments onscreen (the romance between Marlowe and Bacall’s Vivian Sternwood is the film’s major deviation from Chandler).
It all adds up to one of the most entertaining detective movies of its time. It’s a mystery story for those of us who never try to solve the mystery. We just like the shape and the decor of a mystery story. We like detectives, we like personalities, and we like process. The resolution? We forget that two minutes after we close the book (or finish the movie). The ride to get there is the thing. And this is a great ride.