The Big Sleep
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50 free The Big Sleep trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Big Sleep turned a private eye's bad week into one of the most quoted thrillers Hollywood ever made. Humphrey Bogart plays Philip Marlowe, Lauren Bacall plays his client's elder daughter Vivian, and the plot is so knotted that even the people who made the film lost track of it. This quiz covers the story and its characters, the cast and crew, the long and troubled road to cinemas, the novel behind the film and the remake that followed three decades later. The questions run from easy openers to deep cuts for film noir devotees. It is written for classic film fans, crime fiction readers and anyone who has watched Bogart and Bacall spar on screen and wondered what was going on behind the scenes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Nobel Prize-winning novelist co-wrote the screenplay of Humphrey Bogart's film The Big Sleep?
William Faulkner
William Faulkner wrote alternating sections of the first draft with another writer, then left the project. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Q 02In The Big Sleep, whose fatal plunge off the Lido Pier could even the novel's author not explain?
The chauffeur
The chauffeur, Owen Taylor, baffled the filmmakers too. Asked by wire whether it was murder or suicide, the novelist admitted he did not know either.
Q 03What did Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall do in May 1945, while The Big Sleep waited on the shelf?
Got married
Got married: the wedding followed Bogart's divorce, and the public's fascination with the couple later prompted reshoots that gave them more scenes together.
Q 04What does the title The Big Sleep stand for, a phrase Philip Marlowe broods over as the novel ends?
Death
Death is the big sleep of the title, a euphemism from the book's last pages. Time magazine later put the novel on its list of the 100 best.
Q 05Which Coen brothers comedy was loosely inspired by the first Philip Marlowe novel and its famously tangled plot?
The Big Lebowski
The Big Lebowski swaps the private eye for a bowling slacker but keeps what Joel Coen called a hopelessly complex plot that is ultimately unimportant.
Q 06Why did the studio shelve The Big Sleep for more than a year after it was completed in 1945?
To clear its war films
To clear its war films: with peace approaching, the studio feared its backlog of combat pictures would date quickly, while a detective story could wait.
Q 07Which director of His Girl Friday made The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall?
Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks shot The Big Sleep without a finalized script, because the story kept changing during production. He also produced the film.
Q 08Which crime novelist introduced private eye Philip Marlowe in his 1939 debut novel The Big Sleep?
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler had Marlowe tell the story in the first person, and went on to publish seven novels about him.
Q 09Which film first paired Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall before they reunited for The Big Sleep?
To Have and Have Not
To Have and Have Not was Bacall's screen debut and an enormous hit, and its success led the studio to rework The Big Sleep around the pair.
Q 10In which city, home to General Sternwood's mansion, does private eye Philip Marlowe work in The Big Sleep?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles is the setting of both the novel and the 1946 film, although the film's version of the city was built and shot on a studio backlot.
Q 11Which sport do Bogart and Bacall pretend to be discussing in a flirtatious scene added to The Big Sleep in 1946?
Horse racing
Horse racing was only the cover story: the reshot scene has been called one of the most daring examples of double entendre in any movie up to that time.
Q 12Which character in The Big Sleep turns out to have killed General Sternwood's missing protégé?
Carmen
Carmen did it, and the gangster who knew her secret had been holding it over her older sister Vivian ever since.
Q 13In The Big Sleep, where does Vivian win a big wager just before a thug tries to rob her outside?
At a casino
At a casino run by a gangster: the robber was one of the owner's own men, and Marlowe sends him back with a warning to leave Vivian alone.
Q 21Which other famous private eye had Humphrey Bogart already played, in The Maltese Falcon, before The Big Sleep?
Sam Spade
Sam Spade helped make Bogart a star in 1941, five years before audiences saw him as Marlowe.
Q 22Which European capital replaced the original American setting when The Big Sleep was remade in 1978?
London
London in the 1970s became the backdrop, a switch that several reviewers said stripped the story of the time and place it depended on.
Q 23Which star of It's a Wonderful Life played the ailing General Sternwood in the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep?
James Stewart
James Stewart took the supporting part late in his career, joining a starry cast that also included Joan Collins and Oliver Reed.
Q 14Which Hollywood censorship body made the makers of The Big Sleep tone down the sexual themes of the novel?
The Hays Office
The Hays Office barred open references to homosexuality and required seduction to be no more than suggested, so much of the book's sleaze survives only as hints.
Q 15Which gangster in The Big Sleep is shot by his own men after Marlowe pushes him out of a house?
Eddie Mars
Eddie Mars had posted four gunmen outside to ambush Marlowe, so when the detective pushed him through the door first, they fired on their own boss.
Q 16What does Marlowe find beside a murdered bookseller and a drugged young woman early in The Big Sleep?
A hidden camera
A hidden camera with its film already removed: the missing negatives soon reappear as compromising photographs, and the hunt for them drives the early plot.
Q 17Which bookseller's hold over a Sternwood daughter first brings Philip Marlowe into the case in The Big Sleep?
Arthur Geiger
Arthur Geiger is shot in his own house early in the story, and by the time Marlowe returns to the scene the body has disappeared.
Q 18What does the gunman Canino use to kill Harry Jones, the small-time crook helping Marlowe in The Big Sleep?
Poison
Poison, forced on him in a drink: Jones, besotted with a woman named Agnes, had given the killer a false address for her, a lie Marlowe only uncovers afterwards.
Q 19In The Big Sleep, which missing protégé of General Sternwood does Vivian think Marlowe was hired to find?
Sean Regan
Sean Regan is called Rusty in the novel, where he is not a protégé but Vivian's husband, an Irish bootlegger.
Q 20In The Big Sleep, dead bodies are called "red points", a term borrowed from the wartime rationing of what?
Meat
Meat is the reference: red points belonged to wartime rationing, one of several clues that filming began in 1944, long before audiences saw the result.
Q 24Which co-writer of The Big Sleep later worked on the screenplay of the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back?
Leigh Brackett
Leigh Brackett was hired on the strength of a crime novel by a director who assumed its author was a man. She died before the Star Wars film went into production.
Q 25Which actor played Philip Marlowe in the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, three years after Farewell, My Lovely?
Robert Mitchum
Robert Mitchum was 60 during filming, nearly twice the age of the 33-year-old detective in the novel.
Q 26Which studio boss sent the cast of The Big Sleep a mock-stern memo telling them to stop having fun on set?
Jack L. Warner
Jack L. Warner wrote the ribbing memo after hearing how well the cast was getting along, even though filming had fallen weeks behind schedule.
Q 27Which actress, who later won an Oscar for Written on the Wind, plays a flirty bookshop clerk in The Big Sleep?
Dorothy Malone
Dorothy Malone had played only small parts until this unnamed bookshop role, the first to get her noticed.
Q 28Which actor, The Maltese Falcon's young gunman Wilmer, plays the doomed Harry Jones in The Big Sleep?
Elisha Cook Jr.
Elisha Cook Jr. made a long career of such luckless small-timers, later playing the ex-Confederate gunned down by Jack Palance in Shane.
Q 29Which composer of the scores for King Kong and Gone with the Wind wrote the music for The Big Sleep?
Max Steiner
Max Steiner set high strings against low strings and brass to give the score a claustrophobic feel that darkens along with the story.
Q 30Which ex-model plays the younger Sternwood daughter in The Big Sleep, a role that won the novelist's praise?
Martha Vickers
Martha Vickers was cast after the director saw a modelling photo of her, and the novelist felt she outshone the film's leading lady.