With: Humphrey Bogart (Philip Marlowe), Lauren Bacall (Vivian Rutledge), John Ridgely (Eddie Mars), Dorothy Malone (Acme Book Shop Proprietress), Peggy Knudsen (Mona Mars), Regis Toomey (Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls), Charles Waldron (General Sternwood, Charles D Brown (Norris, the Butler), Elisha Cook Jr (Harry Jones)
Director: Howard Hawks
Production Co: Warner Bros - First National Pictures
Producer: Jack L Warner
Music: Max Steiner
Screenplay: William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett, from the novel by Raymond Chandler
Photography: Sid Hickox 
Editor: Christian Nyby
Production Design: Carl Jules Weyl
Sound: Robert B Lee

REVIEW

“About an hour into Howard Hawks's 1946 thriller The Big Sleep, detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is paid his fee and informed that his case is closed. Naturally, he can't let the matter drop – not with nearly half the film still to go.… It's when the mundane matter of payment is disposed of that a gumshoe's investigation becomes something personal, and indeed mythical – a quest. In this case, Marlowe is no longer pursuing a blackmailer, or gambling racketeers, or a circle of drug pushers and pornographers, or whoever is the supposed quarry of his investigation…
Based on Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel, The Big Sleep ostensibly recounts Marlowe's hunt for the shady characters who are making life a misery for one General Sternwood (a majestically desiccated Charles Waldron), father of two wayward daughters. "I assume they have all the usual vices," the General says of his girls, "besides the ones they've invented for themselves." … 
The plot is famously nebulous: when asked by Hawks and his writers to explain a key point in the story, Chandler himself was at a loss. Who knows, or cares, what happened to missing man Sean Regan, or who killed the chauffeur? But the screenwriters – Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman and novelist William Faulkner, himself no stranger to narrative dislocation – keep adding twists and impasses, ensuring that wherever the story signposts disappear, talk and mischief flourish… Despite the equivocation, sex is more visible here than in most films of the period… as verbal flirtation and jousting, often with an easy, for-the-hell-of-it recreational pay-off…
​The big sleep of the title may be death, but it may also be just slumber, and dream. Few thrillers are as mesmerically dream-like, with Geiger's house – the false heart of the maze, to which the story keeps returning – forever sunk in mist and mystery, like a witch's cottage in a Grimm fairytale… The Big Sleep is as fresh and perverse as ever, and remains one of Hollywood's most entrancingly strange bedtime stories.”

— Jonathan Romney, Independent

AUCKLAND FILM SOCIETY 
WAYNE WESTON MEMORIAL SCREENING
Special event, open to the public, all tickets $10 
at Academy Cinemas
​(members free)

Auckland   
Monday, 02 November, 6:30pm