richard-1's - "Have you seen ....? by Film Critic, David Thomson List

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L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) takes on a blackmail case...and follows a trail peopled with murderers, pornographers, nightclub rogues, the spoiled rich and more.

But Raymond Chandler's legendary gumshoe solves it in hard-boiled style - and style is what 'The Big Sleep' is all about.

Hired to work on a yacht belonging to the disabled husband of femme fatale Rita Hayworth, Welles plays an innocent man drawn into a dangerous web of intrigue and murder.

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An ambitious but unscrupulous lawyer (John Garfield) works for the mob, and scents the prospect of a personal fortune when he helps concoct a plan that will merge all of New York City's numbers rackets into a single powerful and unbreakable operation.

But one of them is run by his own brother (Thomas Gomez), who is much happier as an independent, mainly because it allows him to apply his own ethical standards to prevent innocent people from being corrupted by his shady activities. And it's the Cain-and-Abel clash between them that gives the film its tragic dimension.

Jefferies (James Stewart), a photographer with a broken leg, takes up the fine art of spying on his Greenwich Village neighbours during a summer heat wave. But things really hot up when he suspects one neighbour (Raymond Burr) of murdering his invalid wife and burying the body in a flower garden.