10 Amazing Movies That Are Total Nonsense
5. The Big Sleep
1946's The Big Sleep is one of the most entertaining film noirs of all time - a scintillating murder-mystery from the great Howard Hawks where the twisty, convoluted narrative plays second fiddle to the absolutely dynamite chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
The Big Sleep isn't merely confusing in the film noir tradition - it's a movie that was quite literally written as it went along.
Hawks and his co-writers apparently had so little grasp on the narrative that they weren't even sure if the central death was murder or suicide, and when they turned to the novel's author Raymond Chandler for help, he admitted that he didn't know either.
Even though you'll likely be left scratching your head at the plot, the style, atmosphere, and characters are all so magnetic, and The Big Sleep is a vibes movie made decades before anyone used the word "vibes" in a sentence.
In a 1971 interview with Sight and Sound, Hawks perhaps put it best himself:
"We made a picture that worked pretty well called [The] Big Sleep, and I never figured out what was going on, but I thought that the basic thing had great scenes in it and it was good entertainment. After that got by, I said, 'I'm never going to worry about being logical again.'"