THE BIG SLEEP
The Big Sleep is a 1946 film noir directed by Howard Hawks, the first film version of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel of the same name. The movie stars Humphrey Bogart as private detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge in a story about the “process of a criminal investigation, not its results”. William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman co-wrote the screenplay. In 1997, the U.S. Library of Congress deemed the film “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, and added it to the National Film Registry. (More from Wikipedia)
Kim Fowley is the child of two relatively obscure actors; his father Douglas Fowley is a character actor who (as Wikipedia says) “is probably best remembered for his role as the frustrated movie director Roscoe Dexter in Singin’ in the Rain (1952).” As Kim put it, his mother Shelby Payne “was one of the two cigarette girls in The Big Sleep with [Humphrey] Bogart and [Lauren] Bacall”.
(January 2015/1)
