The Big Sleep (1946) on Netflix

Passed19461h 54mCrime Film-Noir Mystery Thriller

General Sternwood hires private detective Philip Marlowe to settle his younger daughter Carmen's debts to a bookseller. Older daughter Vivian thinks the real job is finding a missing man.

Netflix3.9/5
IMDb7.9/1095,045 votes
Rotten Tomatoes96%

Trailer

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Plot summary

Philip Marlowe, a private detective, is called to the home of General Sternwood, a wealthy man who wants the accounts his younger daughter Carmen has run up with a bookseller, Arthur Geiger, taken care of. As Marlowe leaves, Vivian, the older daughter, pulls him aside. She believes her father's real purpose is to find Sean Regan, a man who worked for the general and has not been seen for a month. Geiger has been pressing the general about Carmen's debts. Marlowe takes the assignment, keeps watch on Geiger's shop from across the street, and finds a clerk, Agnes, blocking him from speaking with the bookseller.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Big Sleep (1946)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

SPOILER
Midway through filming, Hawks and the cast realized they did not know whether the chauffeur Owen Taylor had killed himself or was murdered, so a cable was sent to Chandler. He told his friend Jamie Hamilton in a March 21, 1949 letter: "They sent me a wire ... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either".
Filming was continually delayed by Bogart's increased drinking as he ended his tumultuous marriage to Mayo Methot following his affair with Bacall, leaving him unable to work for several days. Hearing the cast were getting along anyway, Jack Warner sent a ribbing memo: "Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop."
To capitalize on the "Bogie and Bacall" phenomenon, Bacall's agent Charles K. Feldman asked the studio to re-shoot scenes for The Big Sleep. Warner agreed, the new scenes were shot in early January 1946, and Julius Epstein wrote them without being given a credit.
In the novel, Geiger sells pornography and is homosexual, in a relationship with Lundgren, and Carmen is described as nude in Geiger's house. The film leaves the men's sexual orientation unmentioned because explicit references to homosexuality were prohibited.
In the mid-1990s the original 1945 cut was found in the UCLA Film and Television Archive, having been released to the military to show troops in the South Pacific. Benefactors including magazine publisher Hugh Hefner and Turner Classic Movies raised the money for its restoration.