Synopsis
Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wealthy General Sternwood regarding a matter involving his youngest daughter Carmen. Before the complex case is over, Marlowe sees murder, blackmail, deception, and what might be love.
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Cast
- Humphrey BogartPhilip Marlowe
- Lauren BacallVivian Sternwood Rutledge
- John RidgelyEddie Mars
- Martha VickersCarmen Sternwood
- Elisha Cook Jr.Harry Jones
- Charles WaldronGeneral Sternwood
- Dorothy MaloneAcme Bookstore Proprietress
- Regis ToomeyChief Inspector Bernie Ohls
- Peggy KnudsenMona Mars
- Charles D. BrownNorris the Butler
- 100
Chicago Sun-Times
It is one of the great film noirs, a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler's ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares. - 100
Empire
Bogart as Marlowe is compelling in this classic thriller that is complex but triumph of atmospheric cool. - 90
Washington Post
Director Howard Hawks’s movie is a film noir touchstone, and features one of Bogart’s best good-man-in-a-tough-spot performances, alongside the irresistible Lauren Bacall. - 88
ReelViews
The Big Sleep remains one of Hollywood's most intriguing and enduring examples of film noir. It's a movie that every film student should study and every movie lover should watch at least once. - 80
The Guardian
The movie's disturbing labyrinthine story of murder and betrayal now looks like a fable by David Lynch: and the witty, charged dialogue between the leads shows that no screen couple, before or since, had as much chemistry as Bogart and Bacall. - 80
The Independent
The Big Sleep is as fresh and perverse as ever, and remains one of Hollywood's most entrancingly strange bedtime stories. - 80
Time
Even on the chaste screen Hawks manages to get down a good deal of the glamorous tawdriness of big-city low life, discreetly laced with hints of dope addiction, voyeurism and fornication. A round dozen minor players help him out with great efficiency— not to mention Miss Bacall, who is like an adolescent cougar. - 75
Chicago Reader
A very good movie (1946), and by far the best Raymond Chandler adaptation, but it isn’t one of Howard Hawks’s most refined efforts—it lacks his clarity of line, his balance, his sense of a free spirit at play within a carefully set structure.