Americans are just a faster paced people. I remember watching British mysteries and thinking how slow paced. Many movies also were slower paced than US.
Not sure if there's a connection, but last night, I think for the first time, I managed to watch
THE BIG SLEEP (1978) the very next night after
THE BIG SLEEP (1946). The Bogart film is overflowing with "witty" dialogue, and the plot is almost impossible to follow. Some of this is because the Productin Code did not allow much of the book to make it into the movie. This included nudity, marital infidelity, drugs, murder, mental illness, and a pornography racket. On top of that, after an initial cut seen only bny the Armed Forces, the film was seriously reedited with a lot of new footage and some scenes cut, and the new footage (most focusing on Bogart & Bacall) is so "distracting" it makes it almost impossble to actually follow the "plot".
But I first saw
THE BIG SLEEP in a theatre in 1978. It's a VERY complex story. and yet... I had NO TROUBLE following the plot, at all! Oh, sure, for most of it, I didn't really know what was going on. Almost every time someone got KILLED, it seemed to come out of nowhere, and let you wondering, "What the HELL is going on???" And it's not until the ENDING that it ALL really comes together. Whoa. Does it.
What I really noticed last night (having watched both versions back-to-back), is how LITTLE dialogue the remake actually has. It's amazing. I mean, they leave plenty of room for characterization (and between the script and the cast, EVERY character stands out from every other character-- you can't get confused, nobody looks or acts like anybody else, it's one of the best casts I've EVER seen in ANY movie). But the dialogue doesn't get in the way of the plot. The dialogue is about 90% pure PLOT. You have to pay attention... but if you do, it's amazingly CLEAR storytelling, for such a confusing story. Which, for this kind of story, I think, is exactly the way to do it.
As a result, even though the film is CRAMMED with detail, detail, detail, when you weatch it, it seems to be slowwwwwwwww and leisurely. You actually have time for each detail to sink it. The only exceptions, really, are the scene with "Harry Jones" (Colin Blakely) in Marlowe's office, where he spils out a HUGE amount of plot detail in a very few minutes (fortunately, much of it is accompanied with visual flashbacks-- in the style of an Agatha Christie movie!), and, the finale, with "Charlotte Sternwood" (Sarah Miles), where we find out EXACTLY what happened to her "missing" husband, and EXACTLY how "Eddie Mars" (Oliver Reed) is tied up with just about EVERYTHING that happened in the entire film.
Eddie gets blown away by his own men by accident in the Bogart film, because somebody had to get it, in the Production Code's eyes. But it seems to me they left out HALF of what he was actually guity of in that versino, while here, AFTER he gets off scot free, we find out he's guilty of far more than we ever imagined. I kinda wonder now (after seeing this version at least 6 times), did Eddie go free in the long run? Does he actually extort money from Charlotte, after her father dies? Or did his scheme fall apart-- was he pulled in by the cops-- or did somebody else punch his ticket as a result of his just being a no-good bastard in general?
This remains my favorite Robert Mitchum film.
