The Big Sleep is a mess because Chandler cobbled it together from four short stories he had previously written for the pulps. (Killer in the Rain, and The Curtain were the two main sources. They had no common characters, but both had a powerful father who is distressed by his wild daughter. He also took small bits of two other stories, The Finger Man and Mandarin's Jade.) This meant loose ends, like who killed the chauffeur. Anyway, it's my least favorite Chandler movie, or book, and my sympathies to anyone seeing the film for the first time. There's something just....unreal about the whole thing.

Agree about the pretty cast. But no one can sing, the music is as monotonous as a metronome and the story is uninteresting.

I don't love The Big Sleep or Chandler in general (I like parts of his work, I'm just not intense about it), but the book The Big Sleep is in no way a mess. The pieces fit together beautifully, wherever they originated from. And Chandler would never be the master of a well-mechanized plot. He wasn't interested in that. He was interested in character and mood.

The music may be--okay, is--monotonous, but the score has yielded two standards, "I Will Wait for You" and "Watch What Happens."

I assume the first is the theme that keeps getting repeated through the movie, which I rather liked, but outside of that, well, I'm surprised to hear there were two songs in the movie, because I thought Demy and Legrand had made a musical without any songs.

Good point regarding Chandler and crafted plots. And when I say "mess," I mean "I had trouble following it." If you saw pieces fitting together beautifully, then it worked for you.

It's possible that The Big Lebowski does, in places, send up TBS. In fact, that seems like a good double feature.