The Big Sleep (1946) DVD

Such a lot of guns around town, and so few brains...

One of the most satisfying and sheerly entertaining movies ever to come out of Hollywood, this marvellous 1946 classic adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled novel is the perfect vehicle for the real-life team of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, whose sultry, zingy dialogue adds spice to what has to be the most intricate, and most exciting, thriller plot ever filmed. In the hands of screen play writers William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman and master director Howard Hawks, who slings the lamps low and keeps violence crackling, this movie zips along down Chandler's mean Los Angelino streets as Bogie's world-weary cynical private eye Philip Marlowe begins a search for a missing chauffeur that turns into a blackmail hunt with a pretty girl at each turn and a corpse on each corner. The sexual undercurrents are torrid, the repartee remarkable, the whole just simply terrific.