The Big Schlep

The Big Sleep (1978)
directed by Michael Winner
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from B. Sweet

The joke in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that 54-year old James Stewart wasn't particularly passable in the early scenes where he plays a fresh-faced law school grad. It's undeniably (but pleasingly) awkward, and never more than when whip-smart immigrant matriarch Nora Ericson spikes a cup of coffee with aquavit, and young Jim drinks deeply, blinks his eyes, and smacks his lips like he's a horse mouthing the wrong cube of sugar. In that sequence, Stewart looks ninety-four, but if ever an expression could be brought to bear on the moment when Vivian and Carmen's dad salivates while watching Philip Marlowe drink cognac in the sweltering Sternwood terrarium, teetotaler Ransom Stoddard's old-age naïvete is it.

In Mrs. Winner's adaptation, the hothouse looks as cold as the flat British countryside, and Sternwood is less a crippled, secretive tyrant than an overwhelmed old man. He joins Marlowe in that glass of brandy, and as soon as the vessel hits the General's lips, everything repressed and festering in the late, great version 1.0 bleeds away like so many phoned-in lines.