The Big Sleep (1946)
Howard Hawks' 1946 Chandler adaptation. Plot incomprehensible even to the screenwriters.
Actor: Elisha Cook Jr
Elisha Cook Jr specialised in small, nervous, doomed men, and The Maltese Falcon gives him the gunsel who is humiliated in every scene he appears in.
The Killing gives him the racetrack cashier whose wife is the reason everything fails, and Shane gives him the homesteader shot in the mud by Jack Palance, one of the most abrupt deaths in any western.
He made more than a hundred films and spent most of his life living alone in the Sierra Nevada, coming down only when work called.
