The Big Sleep

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TonyB

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Just watched this agian yesterday..it stars Bogie...a couple of things I noticed:
1)little colt pocket gun used by Brody(maybe a mustang 380??)
2)lots of snubbies
3)no one ever aims..point shooting all the way baby....
4)fingers always on triggers
5)Bogie actually reloads in one scene
I love these old movies....in one scene Bogie actually uses the term "gat"..and I thought the gang bangers invented that one.....
If you like black and white movies about PI's and Dames ,you'll love this one!
 
Definitely a classic.

The plot of the book and movie was so convoluted, an interviewer once asked Chandler WHO killed one of the numerous dead bodies, and Chandler replied "I'm not sure, I never figured out who did that one".

As for the gun handling, Bogart was apparently a gun collector.
Somewhere, there's a picture of him in his house examining a table full of pistols.
 
if you watch carefully, he has a long and a short-barreled revolver concealed in his car. He looses the long one earlier in the movie, yet, when he flips the concealed board down for the second time, there is only one gun in the clips..and it's the long one.
Yes, nobody ever aims...and they all hold them high up on the grip...the Elliot Ness hold.
 
Great movie. It's pretty bad when your watching a movie made in 1945 and it's the best thing on TV when you have 100 plus channels. I got hooked on the FMC, AMC, and Turner Classic's after running across another Police drama / mystery a few months back called Laura. Stared Gene Tierney (what a hottie) and Vincent Price.
 
Yep, I'd bet on the Colt 1903. They were very popular back then. My buddy inherited his Grandpa's a few years ago. It was his house gun so it was never shot or in a holster. Serial number indicated it was made in 1936. It looked like it was made yesterday. The finish is the deepest, richest blue you ever saw. They just don't blue pistols like that anymore.
 
yeah, looked like a 1903 to me too

I love the old movies. The cars, the way they dressed, the things they did and took for granted that you'd get arrested for nowadays. I grew up on those movies, and still prefer them oftentimes to alot of the new stuff.
 
Read the book and others of that ilk. No one in any of those stories by Dashell Hammet or Raymond Chandler ever seemed to use anything larger than a .32. The slang is also marvelous.
 
I want one of those concealed pop-down trays with pistols clipped on.

My favorite shoot-out is when Bogart gets that thug Canino - he calls him out and then gives him three from the hip.
 
the ending of the book is much more downbeat - no confrontation with Mars.
The drugs and pornography angle was toned down in the movie, to suit the Hays Code of the day.
'The Maltese Falcon' sticks very closely to Dashiel Hammett's novel, large chunks of the dialogue are unchanged. John Huston's 1941 movie was the third attempt at filming this book, the other two are now forgotten.
 
The Big Sleep is a terrific movie, as is The Maltese Falcon.

You gotta love those old flicks. The books were generally somewhat darker.

To Have & Have Not is another good movie...but it is nothing like the book. I love the scene where Bogart's character is confronting the Robinson character and says, "I'll tell you waht Johnnie Rocco wants. He wants more."
 
Another Bogart movie with some old guns in it is The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. This is, in my estimation, quite possibly the best acting job ever performed by Bogart. It is pretty true to the original book too by B. Traven (a pseudonym for the unknown author).

Sometimes I find myself wishing I could afford to make a colelction of all of the guns used in his movies, well maybe not the ship's guns in The Caine Mutiny or the tank gun in Sahara but, all of the handheld firearms would be nice to collect.
 
To Have & Have Not is another good movie...but it is nothing like the book. I love the scene where Bogart's character is confronting the Robinson character and says, "I'll tell you waht Johnnie Rocco wants. He wants more."
Click to expand...

Thats from Key Largo...
 
Thats from Key Largo...
Click to expand...

D'oh! I am becoming my father...one misfiring neuron at a time.

Obviously, I must spend some time re-watching all my favorite Bogart movies, to include Key Largo.

Hey, did you ever see that flick, Pulp Harder? It stars Bruce Willis as an aging, motorcycle-riding boxer who foils a gang of euro-trash techno-criminals lead by Alan Rickman...
 
"To Have & Have Not is another good movie...but it is nothing like the book. I love the scene where Bogart's character is confronting the Robinson character and says, 'I'll tell you waht (sic) Johnnie Rocco wants. He wants more.'"

Yeah, that's from Key Largo.

To Have and Have Not was a quite different and an even better film, with Walter Brennan doing a stellar job as Eddie. ("Was you ever bit by a dead bee? Ya know, dead bees can sting just as bad as live ones, especially if they was kinda mad when they died...")

Everybody who got shot in the old Bogey and other crime movies of the '40s and '50s immediately ceased action and fell down with just one round if they were bad guys. If the hero got shot, though, it was usually in the vicinity of the shoulder, and never seemed to be incapacitating. Cute.
 
Robert Mitchum and Richard Boone did a 1978 remake of The Big Sleep. It wasn't as good as the original. But it is still worth your time.



STUMPY: "Place gettin' all cluttered up with Burdetts."

flatdog.
 
The pocket gun probably is a Colt's 1903 in .32 acp, also Bogart is using what appears to be a Colt's New Service in the house scene.

I do notice how few S&W's show up in older movies, a couple in "To Have and Have Not" (looked like HE's). Generally see more Colt's.

And yes, .32's and .38 S&W's were very popular during those times. My wife's Grandfather carried a S&W .32 Long HE with the 3.25" barrel. My great Uncle carried a New Departure (Lemon Squeezer) in Nickel.

They really don't make 'em like they used to.....

Petrified Forest, High Sierra, Dark Passage....all great movies with actual plots.
 
Mk VII,

Interesting to note than Walter Brennan didn't have a real limp. More pronounced in his later roles, became his trademark. This movie was his first to utilize it.

Best,
JB
 
B. Traven is generally believed to have been Otto Feige, born 1882 in East Prussia, died 1969 in Mexico City. He escaped Germany after participating in the left wing revolutions after World War I and became a Mexican citizen in 1951. Der Schatz der Sierra Madre was written in German in 1927, but Traven also wrote in English. There is an English language biography of him; my source is The Oxford Companion to German Literature.

I would second the suggestion to read Raymond Chandler's novels. He is great at the atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s in L.A. He does name the guns used and the calibers. He makes a few mistakes, but is generally pretty accurate.
 
I did a thread on the guns of "Sierra Madre" a while back:

http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=134550&highlight=Sierra+Madre

There's a new 2-disk set of the film available for a fairly reasonable price, and as you can see from the crisp, clear screenshots they did an excellent job restoring the old print. It's one of the greatest movies ever made IMHO.

I'm waiting for a 2-disk set for "Falcon," but I haven't seen it yet. I do have the standard single disk but it's not terribly crisp and I don't think they did much cleanup.
 
I like "The Big Sleep" for its atmosphere, but I've seen it (and read the book) numerous times and just can't figure out what the hell is going on.

But who cares? With acting and dialogue like that, it's pure joy.

"The Maltese Falcon" is still my all-time favorite Bogart movie, though.
 
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