But Who Killed the Chauffeur?

Bacall had caused a sensation opposite Humphrey Bogart in Hawks's To Have and Have Not (1944) and the studio had rushed the pair into a second venture, in spite of the fact they were trying to avoid each other, having fallen in love on the set and sealed the fate of Bogart's failing marriage to alcoholic actress Mayo Methot. However, Jack Warner insisted on the teaming and even risked the ire of the Breen Office by commissioning a script from a novel that tackled such taboo topics as nymphomania, pornography, homosexuality and police corruption.

Nobel laureate William Faulkner and pulp novelist Leigh Brackett approached their task in a unique way, by adapting alternate chapters of the thriller in which Chandler had introduced private eye Philip Marlowe. However, Bogart had insisted on his lines being beefed up and Jules Furthman and Philip Epstein (who had co-scripted Casablanca) were drafted in at various stages to shift the emphasis away from Martha Vickers's deliciously decadent bad girl and on to her protective, but still far-from saintly sister.

Shooting took place in early 1945. But the picture was withheld, as Warner sought to rush release its backlog of Second World War features before they became old news. In the interim, Bacall's agent asked the studio to make her part more sympathetic and Hawks consented, seeing both the dramatic validity of increasing the sexual tension between the shamus and the socialite and the commercial sense of exploiting the chemistry between the now-married Bogart and Bacall.

One of the casualties of the rewrite, however, was a scene in which Marlowe accorded each crime a culprit and, thus, began the legend of the coshed chauffeur. But, rather than spoiling the story, the confusion enhanced its reputation for crackling convolution - although the curious can see the original version in the first part of BFI Southbank's Howard Hawks retrospective next month. Consequently, The Big Sleep remains one of the best hard-boiled whodunits produced during the Golden Age of Hollywood and it succeeds in pulling off the difficult trick of seeming simultaneously modern and nostalgic.

The action is set in Los Angeles and opens with Marlowe (Bogart) being hired by ailing recluse General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to investigate the connection between his wild daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers) and Arthur Gwynne Geiger (Theodore von Eltz), an antiquarian book dealer who has called in a series of gambling debts that follow hard on the heels of some earlier IOUs that had been claimed by a shady character named Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt). Ordinarily, Sternwood would have entrusted such a mission to his factotum, an ex-IRA soldier and bootlegger named Sean Regan. But he has disappeared and the General asks Marlowe to settle the affair before it leaks to the press.

As he leaves, Marlowe is waylaid by Sternwood's older daughter, Vivian (Bacall), who thinks her father has hired him to track down Regan. There's an instant spark between them, but Vivian has her own secrets to conceal and she is torn between arousal and self-interest, even after Marlowe rescues the intoxicated Carmen from a murder scene at Geiger's home, where she had just been candidly photographed by a hidden camera.

The discovery hours later of the Sternwood chauffeur in a car fished out of the ocean further implicates the family in a potential scandal, as does a phone call demanding $5000 for Carmen's compromising snapshot. Vivian borrows the money from gambler Eddie Mars (John Ridgely), whose wife Mona (Peggy Knudsen) has supposedly absconded with Regan. But Marlowe is scarcely surprised to find Vivian skulking in the shadows when he realises that the blackmailers are Brody and Geiger's brassy assistant, Agnes (Sonia Darrin). However, events take another twist when Brody is gunned down by Geiger's lover, Carol Lundgren (Tommy Rafferty), and a tip-off from meek go-between Harry Jones (Elisha Cook, Jr) pits Marlowe against Mars's sneering henchman, Lash Canino (Bob Steele).

Despite the satisfying challenge of attempting to follow the labyrinthine plot, the real pleasure here lies in the slickness of the staging, the insouciance of the performances and the sting of the dialogue. Sequences such as Bogart's hothouse meeting with the vicariously pleasure-seeking Waldron and his after hours encounter with sassy bookseller Dorothy Malone fizz with an edgy wit that recurs in the slatternly Vickers's gauche attempts to flirt with Bogart and his risqué discussion of racing form with the vampish Bacall. But even minor characters make a deep impression, with the insincere subservience of butler Charles B. Brown and the pathos of Cook's harmless dupe contrasting with the brusque cynicism of inspector Regis Toomey and the ineffectual strong-arming of heavies Ben Welden and Tom Fadden.

Hawks directs with a briskness that is facilitated by the simplicity of his compositions and the efficiency of his camera moves. However, Christian Nyby's sharp editing is perhaps more crucial to the overall mood than either Sidney Hickox's monochrome cinematography or Carl Jules Weyl's production design, as he cuts between close-ups and atmospheric establishing shots with a pace and precision that matches the often rattling banter. Indeed, modern film-makers obsessed with flash-cut handheld imagery would do well to learn from this masterclass in achieving viscerality without inducing nausea.

Hideo Nakata similarly demonstrated the benefit of restraint in the J-horror gems Ring (1998) and Dark Water (2002). However, he struggles to rein in the excesses and contrivances contained in Enda Walsh's cumbersome adaptation of his stage play, Chatroom. Broaching such thorny issues as teenage angst, cyber bullying and suicide sites, this could have been a disconcerting insight into internet ethics. But a tutting undercurrent and the resort to a race-against-time finale tips this into preachy and increasingly implausible melodrama.

Loner Aaron Johnson deeply resents the fact that novelist mother Megan Dodds based the hero of her bestselling boy hero books on his brother, Richard Madden. Consequently, he retreats into his own online world and sets up a chatroom for the equally disenfranchised that quickly attracts trendy Imogen Poots, mousy Hannah Murray, conflicted Daniel Kaluuya and crippingly shy Matthew Beard. Each recruit has their own problem. Wannabe model Poots is insecure about her looks and hates being teased by her bitchy peers, while Murray detests her pushy mother's insistence on improving her and longs for some genuine affection. By contrast, Kaluuya is tormented by a crush on his best mate's underage sister, while Beard is dependent upon antidepressants after being abandoned as a boy by his shiftless father.

However, Johnson is less concerned with helping his new friends than in ameliorating his own sense of inadequacy by manipulating them like characters in a responsibility-free domain. Thus, he sabotages the online profiles of Poots's biggest rival, urges Kaluuya to tell his buddy about his feelings for his gymnast sibling and suggests that Murray indulges in a little subversion to gain her parents' attention. But his decision to push Beard towards suicide prompts his roommates to rebel and sets up a faintly ridiculous denouement at London Zoo.

The hidden perils of the internet are well worth addressing. But they're difficult to depict effectively on film, as characters tapping on a keyboard and reading from a computer screen are hardly dynamic. Nakata and Walsh strive to overcome this by siting the various chatrooms off a long corridor in a shabbily chic hotel and giving each one a distinctive look and feel. But, while these milieux are cleverly designed by Jon Henson and evocatively photographed by Benoît Delhomme, they fail fully to capture the depth of the despair and isolation that are only temporarily assuaged by each visit. Moreover, the omniscience of Johnson's malevolence and the helplessness of his victims are too calculatingly encompassing to convince.

The performances are fine, with Johnson displaying the same hint of melancholic cruelty that he brought to his portrayal of the young John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. But his master plan seems more borne out of brattish petulance than compulsive sociopathy, especially as Nakata largely undermines Johnson's dangerous dementia by illustrating it with a couple of claymation interludes. So, while this may well do enough to unnerve computer-careless adolescents, it will feel like a retrograde step to Nakata's numerous admirers.

A certain superficiality also characterises Freakonomics, a documentary that takes its cue from Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's pop psychology bestseller and mixes stand-alone documentary shorts with talking-head sequences featuring the back-slapping authors. Several pertinent points emerge along the way, but they were made with considerably more trenchancy and less smugness on the page than they are on the screen.

Seth Gordon, the director of King of Kong, drew the short straw of handling the talking-head passages, in which Dubner and Levitt joke awkwardly about such serious topics as conditioning, cheating and incentives. But, while these rather smug asides are eminently resisitble, they provide the essential theoretical links between the vignettes, whose stylistic contrasts mitigates against the cohesion of the entire project.

Opening proceedings is Morgan Spurlock and Jeremy Chilnick's `A Roshanda by Any Other Name', an amusing dissertation that reaches the hardly revelatory conclusion that a child's behaviour is far less likely to be determined by its name than by its social class and environment and the level of control exerted by its parent(s). Stuffed with choice statistics (Californians have come up with over 220 alternative spellings of `Unique' since the 1970s) and anecdotes (such as the one about the mother who accidentally named her daughter Temptress instead of Tempest), this is has all the breeziness of Super Size Me (2004), but all the inconsequentiality of Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? (2008). Consequently, it's more diverting than demanding.

Alex Gibney's `Pure Corruption' is more nuanced, as it seeks to draw comparisons between an institutionalised form of sumo bout rigging and the conduct of business on Wall Street in the run-up to the Credit Crunch. But, while he chronicles the scandal with typical assurance, Gibney is less successful in finding parallels with the Madoff swindle. Rooted in the tenets and rituals of the Shinto religion, sumo had long been considered above reproach. But the sport was rocked in the mid-1990s by the disclosure that wrestlers were prepared to lose fights in order to help colleagues retain their top-rank status. Moreover, stable masters were alleged to have sanctioned violence to bring recalcitrant rikishi into line. But, while there are similarities between the attempts made by the sumo authorities and America's fiscal regulators to maintain a facade of normalcy, Gibney always seems to be straining to make points of contact and, consequently, while this visually striking treatise intrigues, it doesn't wholly persuade.

A similar accusation could be levelled against Andrew Jarecki's `It's Not Always a Wonderful Life', which combines animation and clips from Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) to posit that US crime rates in the 1990s didn't drop as a result of federal, state or civic initiatives, but because the number of potential perpetrators had been so drastically reduced by the legalisation of abortion that followed the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1973 case of Roe vs Wade. By contrast, narrator Melvin Van Peebles asserts, crime boomed in Romania in the same period, as abortion was outlawed and the vast majority of criminals came from single-parent families or the country's notorious orphanages.

This is a highly emotive issue and Jarecki approaches it with a more compassionate eye than Levitt and Dubner's original contention. But his use of the Capra extracts is overly arch, especially as they suggest an element of divine intervention in the causality rather than coincidence. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady stick to more tangible human instincts in `Can You Bribe a 9th Grader to Succeed?', as they follow an experiment conducted by the University of Chicago to see whether cash and other rewards could improve the results of underachieving students. Adopting the fly-on-the-wall technique that proved so effective in Jesus Camp (2006), the co-directors focus on Kevin Muncy, a white, skateboarding class clown whose mother Marcy promises to double any sums he receives, and African-American classmate Urail King, who is as much driven by the prospect of riding in a stretch limo as the devoted goadings of his mother, Teresa.

Demonstrating how satirical slickness, gimmicky graphics and knowing clips pale beside a well-told human interest story, this may be the slightest of the quartet, but it's easily the most accessible and engaging. One suspects that a sequel may well eventually emerge - after all, Levitt and Dubner published SuperFreakonomics in 2009. But, if there is, the wisecracking duo should be kept off camera and more attention should be paid to finding a coherent way of linking the episodes, as there is much here to ponder and provoke.