9 Movie Plot Holes Confirmed By The Creators
1. Who Killed The Chauffeur? - The Big Sleep
The Plot Hole
Despite being consistently regarded as one of the greatest film noirs of all time, Howard Hawks' 1946 classic The Big Sleep is also accepted to be one of the most flatly nonsensical great movies ever made.
You see, The Big Sleep is all about its style, its deliciously witty dialogue, its characters and its smouldering performances - especially Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall - while narrative logic is clearly much less of a concern.
In possibly the only time in human history that anyone will ever compare this movie to The Snowman, it similarly leaves gaping holes wide open in its story, particularly pertaining to the murder of chauffeur Owen Taylor.
The audience quite reasonably expects this mystery to be resolved by film's end, but it ultimately gets swallowed up by the narrative's headache-inducingly confusing nature. And though this might seem like an intentional flourish on the part of Hawks and his screenwriters, it formed a major bone of contention during shooting.
The Confirmation
While filming The Big Sleep, Hawks noted the bizarre, unsatisfying lack of resolution with regard to Owen's fate, and so he along with screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman attempted to come up with their own solution to the murder.
Hawks even went to the trouble of sending the original novel's author, Raymond Chandler, a telegram asking if he could shed some light on the situation, for despite the novel also not revealing Owen's fate, a 1946 movie adaptation would certainly have been expected to dispense with the ambiguity.
Chandler said of receiving the message, "They sent me a wire, asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either!"
And so, Owen's unresolved death formed yet another legendarily confusing part of a movie that hasn't let a loose grasp on coherence stop it from becoming one of the most beloved genre films of all time.
What do you make of these plot holes? Were the filmmakers right to admit it? Shout it out in the comments!