Thus far in my film viewing life I've avoided watching the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep.
The 1946 original starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall was so good I couldn't imagine a remake being anything but bad.
I was wrong- it's worse than that.
The only thing good about it is that it follows Raymond Chandler's book a little more closely than the original- except that it's set in England in the 1970s!
Where do I even start?
Robert Mitchum, an outstanding actor and an icon from the heyday of film noir plays Philip Marlowe- sort of. He's too old for the part, his voice is too deep and gravely, and his diction is not clipped in the way that Chandler's writing (and Bogart's earlier performance) was.
Jimmy Stewart- my favorite actor ever- has a few minutes of screen time as "General Sternwood." I'm not going to say much about his performance because I know from several other sources that he was already suffering from the onset of dementia/Alzheimer's Disease when the movie was filmed.
The Sternwood sisters- who are one of the best parts of the original movie- look like refugees from Studio 54, and the younger of the two, Camilla, is played as though she is developmentally disabled.
Joan Collins also has a small part in the film...ugh.
Lastly, and perhaps most disappointingly, one of my favorite scenes in the original movie- the book store scene between Bogart and Dorothy Malone- isn't even in this movie.
For shame.
