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The Big Sleep (1946)Directed by Howard Hawks Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
(1978) Directed by
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The title is a metaphor for death itself. Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum played Philip Marlowe in two movies based upon the novel by Raymond Chandler, an admitted admirer of Dashiel Hammett. The private eye (is there a better metaphor for the dream?) investigates murder as a by-product of sexual obsession, pornography and drug taking, resulting from family breakdown. Chandler wrote a number of similar novels with Marlowe as protagonist, others also made into movies investigating the seamy underworld of urban L.A. Hammett's Sam Spade, and Chandler's Marlowe are prototypes for the modern, hard-boiled detective.
Reviewer Kerry J. Schooley is a poet, a mystery writer, a cynic, a nag and a pedant.
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