A while back, Comcast decided to bundled Turner Classic Movies

with some furshlugginer sports package, and I lost about the only premium channel I thought was worth a damn (it wasn't worth paying for sports to get it). More recently, my Chief Negotiator, in the process of the annual wrangle with the cable/internet/phone provider at our house, managed to get TCM "thrown in" as we "upgraded" to more service fo less money (introductory rate of course, to be wrangled over again in six or nine or twelve months). TCM has the insufferable Robert Osborne pontificating over their presentations, but that's fair penance for getting their library broadcast without commercial interruptions. So I've been checking regularly, and put TCM on my favorites list of course, and finally last night hit paydirt - The Big Sleep, 1946, Bogie & Bacall and Faulkner and Chandler, lacking only John Huston directing to have made it perfection. Hawks is a classic director, but his work doesn't move me the way Huston's and Billy Wilder's do. I think I've seen The Big Sleep half a dozen times, so it's in the "evergreen" category for me, up there with Double Indemnity and The Stranger and The Third Man, and of course The Maltese Falcon. But I haven't seen it in a few years, so it was fun knowing vaguely that poor Elisha Cook Jr ("Jonesy") was gonna get it but not remembering exactly how until the last minute. And stuff like that. I will say though that the movie would have been improved by omitting Bacall's singing. I'd love to know how much of the final dialog was actually Faulkner's work.