ne would think that it would be quite easy to adapt a novel to a screenplay; after all, what is there to do but turn the dialogue into lines and description into set design? However, common sense, aided by the horrifying number of absolutely awful adaptations, dictates that it simply is not that easy. When moviegoers have problems with a film adaptation of a book, their complaints tend to lie in the tendency of the creators of the film to change elements of the story: plot, character, and the like. It would seem, then, that the best way to make a successful adaptation of a novel would be to just stay as true as possible to every detail mentioned in the book. However, staying as true as possible to plot points, character type, and the like may be the best way to a horrendous adaptation.

In moving from the printed page to the silver screen, moviemakers must be aware that they are not simply reproducing a narrative&emdash;they are changing the medium by which the narrative is presented. Oddly enough, cinema lends itself easily to some of the tenets of writing well: namely, the command of, "show, don't tell." In cinema, there is no option, really, of telling, "the details are not asserted as such by a narrator but simply presented." (Chatman 406). The use of a voiceover, of course, is an option, but even the voice of an omniscient narrator cannot stop the viewer from seeing the images and interpreting what he sees. In movies, the viewer does his own telling.

The very nature of The Big Sleep, then, makes adaptation difficult. The entire narrative is described by a character within the story space: Marlowe tells us the entire story. Our view of the plot, then, is clouded by Marlowe's sight. Being a character within the story space, he has his own feelings and his own reactions to what happens to and around him, and he passes those reactions&emdash;albeit unconsciously&emdash;to the reader, who, also unconsciously, picks up on them.

Marlowe does not act the role of mediator, though, in the film version of The Big Sleep. Rather than viewing the film through the eyes of a diegetic character, we view it through the eye of a camera lens. And, though we typically assume the cold vision of the lens to be objective, the fact is that The Big Sleep is a film that is tightly bound and defined by its genre. Film noir, while not imparting emotions and responses as Marlowe did in the book, brings with it a set of expectations and a dogmatic adherence to rules of genre that affect our view of the film at least as much as Marlowe's subjective commentary does in the book.

Granted, Marlowe is our point of entry into the film, and by "confining our range of knowledge to Marlowe's, the film can create curiosity and surprise," (Bordwell and Thompson 102). Just as in the novel, our knowledge of the crimes committed during the narrative is limited to what Marlowe knows. However, even though we are restricted to Marlowe's knowledge and know what we know only through him, "we very seldom see or hear things from Marlowe's perceptual vantage point, and we never get direct access to his mind," (Bordwell and Thompson 105).

This is not to say that we do have direct access to Marlowe's mind in the novel of The Big Sleep. Although we never explicitly receive his thoughts on certain matters, we can see into his mind through his actions, reactions and, of course, his rich sense of humor. The novel creates an implicit access to Marlowe that the film simply cannot give us.

Rather than relying on Marlowe for interpretation, then, we rely on the conventions associated with film noir. Even if a viewer is not familiar with the term, the genre has become so present, pervasive and parodied in American cinema that almost anyone knows the rules of the game: the sidewalk is always wet and glistening (even if it's not raining), a lone saxophone always wails plaintively just out of sight, and you never trust a character who is followed by two guys who he refers to solely as his "men."

The fact that The Big Sleep is a very conventional film noir leads us to make assumptions about character and situation that are very different from those we make in the book, when Marlowe's constant inner monologue is our only guide. For example, when Marlowe meets Vivian in the book, the dialogue the two exchange make Vivian seems rather . . .witchy. When she says that she thought that private detectives existed only in books, or were "greasy little men snooping around hotels," (Chandler 18), the silence that Marlowe responds with makes her seem blunt and rather rude. However, when we meet Lauren Bacall as Vivian, she seems a bit warmer.

It's important to notice that Hughes uses a very soft focus to shoot Bacall here, making her a little fuzzy around the edges. Not so much that she becomes some idealized, romantic version, but just enough so that we don't hate her immediately. Where Vivian in the book is, though beautiful, cold and hard, Bacall's Vivian is a bit easier to take at first sight.

As the dialogue continues in the book, Marlowe and Vivian trade jabs and verbal barbs with pointed determination. Marlowe doesn't tell us what he thinks of Vivian now&emdash;he thinks she's beautiful, yes, but that's more a statement of fact than any kind of emotional response. When the scene is on film, though, genre convention again rears its head. We know, because we've seen movies like this before, that Marlowe and Vivian are going to find one another attractive and probably end up together. Bacall and Bogart easily play to this convention, and the chemistry just radiates off of the screen. Through convention and through the lens of the camera, we read Marlowe and his relationship to Vivian differently than we do in the book. We really have no choice; where Marlowe gives us no hint at all as to what he'' feeling, we can see Bogart as Marlowe and we know exactly what he's thinking when he's in that bedroom with Lauren Bacall. Marlowe no longer serves as our narrator because we don't need him to&emdash;we've got the lens.

This is not to say that the novel of The Big Sleep is not holding to the conventions of the hard-boiled detective fiction genre; after all, it is one of the examples of hard-boiled writing. However, the genre conventions present there, while similar to, are not the same as the genre conventions of film noir. The two genres are not interchangeable, though they are closely related; The Big Sleep transfers much more easily into film noir than it would, I imagine, transfer into a musical. When the novel moves from one medium into another, the genre conventions that it obeys must move, too.

Everything changes a little when we see it, especially when we move from the written word to the spoken. Add the visual image, and things get even more complicated. A big part of Chandler's The Big Sleep's charm is Marlowe's biting narration, but it just doesn't convert to film well. However, as we lose our written narrator, the eye of the lens and the rigors of convention step in to take his place.

Works Cited

Big Sleep, The. Dir. Howard Hawks. 1946.

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art. 5th Edition. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939.

Chatman, Seymour. "What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (And Vice Versa)." Film Theory and Criticism, Fourth Edition. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, Leo Braudy, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.