1. I was not in class the day we watched The Big Sleep and it was a classic detective crime movie. Film noir is described as "stylish Hollywood crimes, particularly those who emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations". This movie closely fit that standard as Philip Marlowe goes through the movie finding out who was blackmailing General Sternwood and finding out much more along the way. He finds one of the Generals daughters drugged at a crime scene in Geiger (criminal) house. That eventually leads to finding out that Eddie Mars has been behind all the blackmailing and Marlowe kills him.
2. I found this article on TCM.com that explains why The Big Sleep was essential to film. It explains how this type of film noir changed how movies like that were made. This movie changed the genre by the way it progressed through the movie, with little dialogue but still a lot of things going on. The movie always kept me guessing which was it's goal in order to make it a great noir. Directors today still make movies like The Big Sleep.
3. I thought the article had a great point explaining how important this movie was to this type of genre. It changed the way crime movies were looked at made.
4. This was actually one of the movies in this class that I really really liked because of how it was structured. There may not have been a lot of dialogue but it was still easy to watch because of how the story kept pulling you in. It always kept me in suspense, I never could predict what was going to happen next. I think that's what made it such a great movie, especially for it's time. Now a days we see tons of movies like that, and I believe it was because of The Big Sleep
