THE BIG SLEEP

TCM, 6.35pm

The plot of this Raymond Chandler adaptation verges on the inexplicable: it’s a mélange of murder,

blackmail, gambling and pornography. But Howard Hawks’s film noir carries it off magnificently, thanks to the electric chemistry between Humphrey Bogart, playing private eye Philip Marlowe, and Lauren Bacall, as the sister of the blackmailed victim. Stay with it all the way.

1946, b/w