Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34282 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-11-06
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 95 minutes

Special Features
16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
DVD 5
English
English
Region 2
Dolby Digital Stereo English
Dolby Digital Stereo
Interactive Menus
Scene Access

Synopsis
Director Winner switched the setting of Chandler's classic Marlowe mystery from 1940s Los Angeles to 1970s London, perhaps to avoid comparison with its forerunner. The 1946 Bogart/Bacall masterpiece is a tough act to follow, but this version is interesting in its own right for Mitchum's take on the fabled private eye.

Customer Reviews

not as bad as you'd think!!
this film takes a real panning in most guide books but it is really not too bad.
mitchum is just right as an ageing marlowe and, once you get used to the english seting, the action rattles along at a cracking pace.
the cast is good (especially oliver reed)and the story follows chandlers' book much more closely than the 40s version (which is indeed a classic).
if you expect art you wont find it here, what you will find is a well made, solidly entertaining movie.

Who thought this was a good idea and how drunk were they at the time?
The Big Sleep has to be the most bizarre pitch of the 70s: giving Michael Winner carte blanche to transfer Philip Marlowe from LA's mean streets to the Green Streets of suburban England. With so many of the stellar supporting cast just so terribly wrong for their parts - a drunken Richard Boone with his leg in a cast as an unintentionally comical Lash Canino, Sarah Miles with the worst wardrobe and the biggest Afro you've ever seen on a white woman displaying all the sex appeal of a decomposing antelope in the Lauren Bacall role, Edward Fox as a bookie, John The Thief of Bagdad Justin as a glass-eyed gay blackmailer and Richard Todd as the police commissioner - it's only Robert Mitchum who keeps the thing afloat, even managing to keep a straight face when confronted with such dangerous characters as Dudley Sutton and Derek Deadman. On one level it is perversely watchable without ever being gleefully bad, but like almost all of Winner's films it shows his amazing ability to flatten any material he gets his hands on. Still, at least Mitchum amused himself on the set telling any passing Arabs he saw that Michael Winner was forcing the cast to give 25% of their salary to Mossad and then giving them the director's home address - "You can't miss it, it's the one with the effigy of Yasser Arafat hanging from the chimney."

No extras on the DVD.

This film is dire, don't buy it!
The Big Sleep is a modern American classic, a great book with a wonderful 1946 film noire based on it-though with some distortions of the book's character and plot to produce a Hollywood happy ending.

The 1977 version is just plain awful. Robert Mitchum is either too old, too tired or not interested in the screenplay (and who can blame him?) The direction is plodding and the whole thing wades through porridge. -Buy the 1946 one with Bogey and Bacall!