The Big Sleep (1946)

<p>Marty Jencius and Cindy Rotz follow Humphrey Bogart&#39;s Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall&#39;s Vivian Rutledge through rain, blackmail, and a plot nobody can fully explain, and ask whether a movie needs to make sense when it has this much style.</p><p><br></p><p>FILM ESSENTIALS</p><p>- Director/Producer: Howard Hawks</p><p>- Screenplay: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman, from Raymond Chandler&#39;s 1939 novel</p><p>- Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers</p><p>- Supporting: John Ridgely, Dorothy Malone, Elisha Cook Jr., Bob Steele, Regis Toomey, Peggy Knudsen</p><p>- Cinematography: Sidney Hickox | Music: Max Steiner | Editor: Christian Nyby</p><p>- Warner Bros. | Black and white | about 114 minutes</p><p>- Budget about $1.6 million; box office about $4.9 million</p><p>- Premiered in New York on August 23, 1946</p><p>- Second of four Bogart and Bacall films</p><p>- National Film Registry, 1997 | Rotten Tomatoes: 96% | AFI&#39;s 32nd greatest film hero (Marlowe)</p><p><br></p><p>TRIVIA</p><p>- Chandler&#39;s first novel introduced Philip Marlowe. By Hawks&#39;s account, he bought the rights the day after suggesting it.</p><p>- Hawks and Bogart couldn&#39;t agree on who killed the chauffeur, so they asked Chandler. He reportedly said he didn&#39;t know either.</p><p>- Faulkner and Brackett reportedly wrote alternating sections and met only once. Faulkner went home to Mississippi to write, and Hawks assumed Brackett was a man. She later wrote Rio Bravo and an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back.</p><p>- Bogart married Bacall on May 21, 1945, a few months after the shoot wrapped. Jack Warner reportedly sent a memo: &quot;Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop.&quot;</p><p>- Marlowe asks for an 1860 first edition of Ben-Hur. The novel wasn&#39;t published until 1880.</p><p>- Eddie Mars&#39;s henchmen are named Sidney and Pete, a nod to Greenstreet and Lorre.</p><p>- After Bacall&#39;s Confidential Agent flopped, Hawks reshot scenes in 1946, including the famous horse-racing exchange.</p><p>- The 1945 cut, shown to servicemen overseas, was rediscovered at UCLA in the mid-1990s. A 2015 Blu-ray includes both versions.</p><p>- Dorothy Malone, in the bookshop scene, later won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Written on the Wind (1956).</p><p>- Charles Waldron, as General Sternwood, died before the film premiered. James Stewart played the role in the 1978 remake.</p><p>- Max Steiner&#39;s