50 Fun Facts About The Big Sleep

Which Nobel Prize-winning novelist co-wrote the screenplay of Humphrey Bogart's film The Big Sleep?

William Faulkner wrote alternating sections of the first draft with another writer, then left the project. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In The Big Sleep, whose fatal plunge off the Lido Pier could even the novel's author not explain?

The chauffeur, Owen Taylor, baffled the filmmakers too. Asked by wire whether it was murder or suicide, the novelist admitted he did not know either.

What did Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall do in May 1945, while The Big Sleep waited on the shelf?

Got married: the wedding followed Bogart's divorce, and the public's fascination with the couple later prompted reshoots that gave them more scenes together.

What does the title The Big Sleep stand for, a phrase Philip Marlowe broods over as the novel ends?

Death is the big sleep of the title, a euphemism from the book's last pages. Time magazine later put the novel on its list of the 100 best.

Which Coen brothers comedy was loosely inspired by the first Philip Marlowe novel and its famously tangled plot?

The Big Lebowski swaps the private eye for a bowling slacker but keeps what Joel Coen called a hopelessly complex plot that is ultimately unimportant.

Why did the studio shelve The Big Sleep for more than a year after it was completed in 1945?

To clear its war films: with peace approaching, the studio feared its backlog of combat pictures would date quickly, while a detective story could wait.

Which director of His Girl Friday made The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall?

Howard Hawks shot The Big Sleep without a finalized script, because the story kept changing during production. He also produced the film.

Which crime novelist introduced private eye Philip Marlowe in his 1939 debut novel The Big Sleep?

Raymond Chandler had Marlowe tell the story in the first person, and went on to publish seven novels about him.

Which film first paired Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall before they reunited for The Big Sleep?

To Have and Have Not was Bacall's screen debut and an enormous hit, and its success led the studio to rework The Big Sleep around the pair.

In which city, home to General Sternwood's mansion, does private eye Philip Marlowe work in The Big Sleep?

Los Angeles is the setting of both the novel and the 1946 film, although the film's version of the city was built and shot on a studio backlot.

Which sport do Bogart and Bacall pretend to be discussing in a flirtatious scene added to The Big Sleep in 1946?

Horse racing was only the cover story: the reshot scene has been called one of the most daring examples of double entendre in any movie up to that time.

Which character in The Big Sleep turns out to have killed General Sternwood's missing protégé?

Carmen did it, and the gangster who knew her secret had been holding it over her older sister Vivian ever since.

In The Big Sleep, where does Vivian win a big wager just before a thug tries to rob her outside?

At a casino run by a gangster: the robber was one of the owner's own men, and Marlowe sends him back with a warning to leave Vivian alone.

Which Hollywood censorship body made the makers of The Big Sleep tone down the sexual themes of the novel?

The Hays Office barred open references to homosexuality and required seduction to be no more than suggested, so much of the book's sleaze survives only as hints.

Which gangster in The Big Sleep is shot by his own men after Marlowe pushes him out of a house?

Eddie Mars had posted four gunmen outside to ambush Marlowe, so when the detective pushed him through the door first, they fired on their own boss.

What does Marlowe find beside a murdered bookseller and a drugged young woman early in The Big Sleep?

A hidden camera with its film already removed: the missing negatives soon reappear as compromising photographs, and the hunt for them drives the early plot.

Which bookseller's hold over a Sternwood daughter first brings Philip Marlowe into the case in The Big Sleep?

Arthur Geiger is shot in his own house early in the story, and by the time Marlowe returns to the scene the body has disappeared.

What does the gunman Canino use to kill Harry Jones, the small-time crook helping Marlowe in The Big Sleep?

Poison, forced on him in a drink: Jones, besotted with a woman named Agnes, had given the killer a false address for her, a lie Marlowe only uncovers afterwards.

In The Big Sleep, which missing protégé of General Sternwood does Vivian think Marlowe was hired to find?

Sean Regan is called Rusty in the novel, where he is not a protégé but Vivian's husband, an Irish bootlegger.

In The Big Sleep, dead bodies are called "red points", a term borrowed from the wartime rationing of what?

Meat is the reference: red points belonged to wartime rationing, one of several clues that filming began in 1944, long before audiences saw the result.

Which other famous private eye had Humphrey Bogart already played, in The Maltese Falcon, before The Big Sleep?

Sam Spade helped make Bogart a star in 1941, five years before audiences saw him as Marlowe.

Which European capital replaced the original American setting when The Big Sleep was remade in 1978?

London in the 1970s became the backdrop, a switch that several reviewers said stripped the story of the time and place it depended on.

Which star of It's a Wonderful Life played the ailing General Sternwood in the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep?

James Stewart took the supporting part late in his career, joining a starry cast that also included Joan Collins and Oliver Reed.

Which co-writer of The Big Sleep later worked on the screenplay of the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back?

Leigh Brackett was hired on the strength of a crime novel by a director who assumed its author was a man. She died before the Star Wars film went into production.

Which actor played Philip Marlowe in the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, three years after Farewell, My Lovely?

Robert Mitchum was 60 during filming, nearly twice the age of the 33-year-old detective in the novel.

Which studio boss sent the cast of The Big Sleep a mock-stern memo telling them to stop having fun on set?

Jack L. Warner wrote the ribbing memo after hearing how well the cast was getting along, even though filming had fallen weeks behind schedule.

Which actress, who later won an Oscar for Written on the Wind, plays a flirty bookshop clerk in The Big Sleep?

Dorothy Malone had played only small parts until this unnamed bookshop role, the first to get her noticed.

Which actor, The Maltese Falcon's young gunman Wilmer, plays the doomed Harry Jones in The Big Sleep?

Elisha Cook Jr. made a long career of such luckless small-timers, later playing the ex-Confederate gunned down by Jack Palance in Shane.

Which composer of the scores for King Kong and Gone with the Wind wrote the music for The Big Sleep?

Max Steiner set high strings against low strings and brass to give the score a claustrophobic feel that darkens along with the story.

Which ex-model plays the younger Sternwood daughter in The Big Sleep, a role that won the novelist's praise?

Martha Vickers was cast after the director saw a modelling photo of her, and the novelist felt she outshone the film's leading lady.

What crime does General Sternwood hire Philip Marlowe to handle at the start of The Big Sleep?

Blackmail is only the beginning: a case that opens with a daughter's troublesome debts leads Marlowe through a string of murders.

Which audience saw a version of The Big Sleep in 1945, more than a year before its official release?

Servicemen overseas were shown the first cut, a print sent to troops in the South Pacific that then went unseen for half a century.

In which industry did the author of The Big Sleep lose an executive job in 1932, pushing him into pulp fiction?

Oil paid his salary until his drinking and absences got him dismissed in the depths of the Depression; his first novel appeared seven years later.

What grisly name did the author of The Big Sleep give his habit of reworking old magazine stories into novels?

Cannibalizing two tales from the mid-1930s gave the novel its plot, and stitching them together is one reason a few loose ends were left dangling.

The author of The Big Sleep earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing which Billy Wilder film noir?

Double Indemnity came out in 1944, the year The Big Sleep began shooting, and its director credited the novelist with much of its memorable dialogue.

Which magazine publisher was among the benefactors who paid to restore the long-lost 1945 cut of The Big Sleep?

Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, helped fund the restoration after the earlier cut turned up in a film archive in the 1990s.

Which actor became the first screen Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, two years before The Big Sleep?

Dick Powell had come to stardom in musical comedies, and the novelist objected to his casting at first before growing very fond of the film.

Which pulp magazine first published the author of The Big Sleep, printing a crime tale of his in 1933?

Black Mask was founded in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to offset the losses of their upmarket magazine The Smart Set.

Which poorly received Lauren Bacall spy film of 1945 prompted the studio to reshoot parts of The Big Sleep?

Confidential Agent drew harsh reviews for Bacall, so her agent pressed for new scenes that would show off her chemistry with Bogart.

For which 1951 adventure with Katharine Hepburn did Humphrey Bogart, star of The Big Sleep, win his only Oscar?

The African Queen won him Best Actor for playing a rough steamboat captain, and he considered it the best performance of his film career.

Which nickname did Lauren Bacall, co-star of The Big Sleep, earn from a mannerism that began as a cure for nerves?

The Look came from her first screen tests: to stop herself quivering she pressed her chin to her chest and tilted her eyes up at the camera.

Which Pulitzer-winning critic called The Big Sleep a Great Movie and preferred the 1946 release to the 1945 cut?

Roger Ebert called the reshoots a case where studio interference was exactly the right thing, arguing the film is about the process of an investigation, not its results.

Which John Huston thriller was the last of the four films that paired Humphrey Bogart with Lauren Bacall?

Key Largo closed a run of four films together in five years, all for the same studio; Dark Passage, the third, had come a year earlier.

Which future author of Fahrenheit 451 finished a friend's novella when that friend left to script The Big Sleep?

Ray Bradbury completed the second half of the science-fiction tale Lorelei of the Red Mist, which ran in the magazine Planet Stories.

Which director of the 1972 hitman thriller The Mechanic remade The Big Sleep in 1978 with an all-star cast?

Michael Winner claimed to have changed the storyline far less than the 1946 film did, and restored material the earlier version could only hint at.

Which creator of the detective Spenser wrote Perchance to Dream, an authorised sequel to The Big Sleep?

Robert B. Parker opened the sequel with long passages lifted from the original novel, then announced he would write no more Marlowe books.

What does the "B" sticker on the window of Philip Marlowe's car in The Big Sleep show that he is entitled to?

Extra gasoline: the wartime B ration sticker marked a driver whose work was judged essential, and allowed him eight gallons a week.

Which New York Times critic complained in 1946 that The Big Sleep left the viewer confused and dissatisfied?

Bosley Crowther also wrote that Bacall had still not learned to act. Decades later the film ranked among the top 250 in Sight & Sound's poll of critics.

Which fashion magazine's 1943 cover led a director's wife to recommend Lauren Bacall, later of The Big Sleep?

Harper's Bazaar put the teenage model on its March 1943 cover, and a mix-up by the director's secretary sent her a ticket to Hollywood for the audition.

In which university's film archive was the lost 1945 cut of The Big Sleep rediscovered in the 1990s?

UCLA archivists restored the print, and a documentary released with it shows what was left out and what was newly shot for the 1946 version.