Big Sleep, The

film noir adaptation (1946) of the novel by Raymond Chandler. It was directed by Howard Hawks and adapted by William Faulkner. Humphrey Bogart plays the hard-bitten private eye Philip Marlowe, who becomes embroiled in the problems of a wealthy family (drugs, sex, and murder). The labyrinthine plot is held together by the sexual frisson between Bogart and Lauren Bacall as the elder daughter trying to protect her errant sister.

A less complex version of the film, featuring fewer Bogart–Bacall scenes, was completed in 1945 but not released. Discovered in the vaults of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, this earlier version was restored with the aid of British Film Institute funding and was first screened at the National Film Theatre in London in 1997.