Day 12:01 am

  • The Big Sleep press book and the scarce ephemera of celluloid tales…

    The Big Sleep-1978-Robert Mitchum-press book image

    Well, I’ve mentioned Robert Mitchum in the 1970s around these parts before (see Day #3/365a)…

    …The Big Sleep from 1978 is part of what I think of as his triptych of classic world weary roles from that time.

    World weary but he still looks like if he wanted to flatten you, well, you would be flattened.

    The film stars amongst others a veritable A-Z of once absolute A-list stars who are possibly past their peaks in various ways – all of which suits both the updating of Mr Chandler’s hardboiled noir and the sense of society turned corrupt/gone to seed/70s grime… so we have his good self Mr Robert Mitchum, Ms Joan Collins in her best 1970s sauce mode, sometime turn of the the decade countercultural bolthole escapist hood Edward Fox, Sarah Miles, Ollie Reed (also heading towards that big tired, bear of a man point), James Stewart, John Mills…

    …oh and looking it up, future él Records gent and King Of Luxembourg to be Mr Simon Fisher-Turner.

    Well, I wasn’t expecting that. I was planning a rewatch of it again soon but that makes that somewhat rather more likely, just to spot that particular chap.

    The image is from one of the pressbook for the film – generally a good find as they seem like scarce, precious documents of celluloid stories from a time before there was such wall-to-wall, head-to-toe, easily available merchandise for such things.

    View more of such things at Ms Joan Collins site here.

    I shall no doubt be returning to this particular celluloid tale at some point in the future as it seem to have taken something of a longstanding hold of my mind but in the meantime I shall but post the slightly odd, stylised glory of this particular image.

    Peruse the film here.

     

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