Finest hours: Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep
On what would have been her 100th birthday, we remember model-turned-actress Martha Vickers and her scene-stealing performance – playing younger sister to Lauren Bacall – as the flirtatious Carmen Sternwood.
“You’re not very tall, are you?”
In the opening scene of 1946 noir classic The Big Sleep, Carmen Sternwood makes quite the impression. After disparaging the height of private detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), the two trade more flirtatious words. She chews her hair and bats her eyelashes at him, and then falls in his direction so he has no choice but to catch her – or as Marlowe later puts it, “She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.” This all takes place in 70 seconds.
Playing Carmen is Martha Vickers, then only 21. Vickers was three years into her big-screen career, and yet to make a splash – her biggest role to date had been the love interest in The Falcon in Mexico (1944), the ninth instalment of the detective movie series. The film hadn’t asked a lot of her but to retain a vague air of mystery. Though just a supporting part, The Big Sleep would give her far more to do.
While Vickers gets significantly less screen time than Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall – who plays her elder sister – it’s Carmen who both initiates and drives the story. Her father initially summons Marlowe to help resolve her gambling debts. Throughout the notoriously complicated narrative, if there’s trouble going on, Carmen is never far away. She is a human wrecking ball, yet childlike enough to be oblivious to the damage she’s causing. Although her performance is larger-than-life to the extent that it’s almost cartoonish, Vickers gives both the destructive and the vulnerable sides of Carmen terrific shading, creating a character whose aura lingers even when she’s not actually on screen.
Vickers’ performance was well-received upon release, most famously of all by Raymond Chandler, who’d penned the source novel. He said after watching the initial cut, “the girl who played the nymphy sister was so good, she shattered Bacall completely.” He theorised that the 1946 version of the movie (the most widespread edition on streaming platforms today) excised her best scenes, so as to not overshadow the putative leading lady. While there is still some doubt over the extent to which this is true, the historical consensus remains that, to some degree at least, Vickers was robbed.
And her following decade was characterised by further disappointments. She’d play another little sister in her next movie, The Man I Love (1946), but this time around, no-one would accuse her of overshadowing her older sibling (Ida Lupino). She made a trio of fluffy comedies and a pair of low-budget, low-quality noirs as the female lead. There were a couple of thinly written supporting roles in slightly more prestigious productions. None of the parts were a fraction as memorable as Carmen. Though Vickers proved herself a malleable presence, able to move across genres and the moral spectrum with ease, the material wasn’t enough to showcase her talent.
Vickers had to wait a long time for another part as juicy as Carmen – it wouldn’t come until her penultimate film, The Burglar (1957). She plays Della, a woman who hits on the titular burglar, Nat (Dan Duryea), at a bar. He is initially too distracted to pay her advances much notice, but after she slaps him across the face (“Just to let you know, I’m not selling anything”), she gets his attention. The two spend the evening together, quickly bonding over their troubled backstories, but as it turns out – spoiler alert! – she is only interested in locating the priceless necklace he stole earlier in the movie. Later on, she starts to feel guilty about her betrayal.
She just has a few scenes in The Burglar, but Vickers invests them with all the dynamism and interiority of a main character. There’s some of Carmen’s erratic hypersexuality to Della, but it’s textured by the conflicted wariness of a person who has lived more years on the planet. Watching today, as with her turn in The Big Sleep, it feels like the kind of performance that should have led to great things for her.
Alas, there would be only one more film ahead for Vickers (forgettable 1960 western Four Fast Guns), and that would be that. She did not have a long career, or in fact a long life – she retired from both film and TV acting when she was just 35 years old, and would die 11 years later of oesophageal cancer.
Much like her two best characters in their respective movies, however, Vickers’ all-too-fleeting presence would leave an indelible mark on cinema history.