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Sunday November 3rd 2024

The Big Sleep | 1946

General Sternwood hires Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) to protect his wild daughter in the classic noir treatment of Raymond Chandler’s novel. The film was made entirely on the Warner Bros lot, at 4000 Warner Boulevard in Burbank, but many locales are based on real locations.

Marlowe’s ‘Cahuenga Building’ was the former Security Pacific Bank building at 6381 Hollywood Boulevard, on the northeast corner of Cahuenga in Hollywood. In the 90s, this intersection was designated a Historic-Cultural Monument, as Raymond Chandler Square. ‘Geiger’s’ shady bookstore was supposedly based on Book Treasury, which stood at 6707 Hollywood Boulevard, and the apartment at which Joe Brody is murdered is on the corner of Palmerston Place and North Kenmore Avenue, just north of Franklin Avenue in Los Feliz.

The 1978 remake, with Robert Mitchum, relocates the action, not very successfully, to London.