A classic of forties Hollywood film noir, The Big Sleep had the dream team of Howard Hawks directing, from a Raymond Chandler novel, with Humphrey Bogart playing the famous detective Philip Marlowe alongside Lauren Bacall as femme fatale Vivian Rutledge, and a script penned by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman. Not bad, huh? Hired to help settle the gambling debts of a young woman by her rich father, it turns out that Marlowe's actually become entangled with a familial conspiracy involving the disappearance of a young man, blackmail and multiple murders. Roger Ebert described the film as being about the "process of a criminal investigation, not its results". The film isn't a traditional whodunit, and had such a convoluted plot that even the filmmakers couldn't figure it out, with neither the director nor the screenwriters knowing whether a certain character was murdered or had killed himself. Not even Chandler could enlighten them on that one. A purposefully messy crime story with a mostly innocent detective stumbling across a mystery much bigger than himself, hm. What if you swapped out Bogie's gumshoe for Jeff Bridges as a bowling stoner with a grudge against the Eagles? The Big Lebowski is a fairly obvious, unabashed homage to Raymond Chandler novels, but The Big Sleep specifically. The names are even similar! Beyond that, however, the complicated mystery plots - stuffed full with red herrings and dead ends - are pretty much identical, as are a lot of the major story beats. You can be forgiven for not noticing the similarities, however, since the convoluted story of Lebowski seems as much down to The Dude's pretty strict drug regimen, bowling commitments and insane group of friends mucking things up.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
