Howard Hawks' classic thriller captures the tough and darkly humorous world of Raymond Chandler's most complicated novel, with Humphrey Bogart at his best as Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as the fast-talking rich kid who invites him into an impossibly intricate web of blackmail and murder. Even Hawks cannot explain one of the killings, which in any case take a back seat to the sophisticated Marlowe's more pressing task: unravelling the enigmatic psychologies of his enemies and so-called friends (Bacall says more in this film with a scratch of her bony knee than all her whiz-kid repartée).

Jean-Luc Godard, in his essay “Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction” comments: “If one had to pin down a somewhat excessive taste for death in the American cinema, I would suggest that it lies... in those moments where, in the panic of the heart, the slightest gesture reveals certain knowledge.... (T)he classical construction sticks...closer to psychological reality, by which I mean that of the emotions; there are, in effect, no spiritual storms, no troubles of the heart which remain unmarked by physical causes.... Certainly one has only to consider the development of the greatest American artist - Howard Hawks.... From...Only Angles Have Wings to...The Big Sleep...what does one see? An increasingly precise taste for analysis, a love for this artificial grandeur connected to movements of the eyes, to a way of walking, in short, a greater awareness than anyone else of what the cinema can glory in....” (in Milne, “Godard on Godard”)