Charles Waldron credited as playing...
General Sternwood
- General Sternwood: Do you like orchids?
- Philip Marlowe: Not particularly.
- General Sternwood: Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. Their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
- General Sternwood: You knew him too?
- Philip Marlowe: Yes, in the old days, when he used to run rum out of Mexico and I was on the other side. We used to swap shots between drinks, or drinks between shots, whichever you like.
- General Sternwood: My respects to you, sir. Few men ever swapped more than one shot with Sean Regan.
- Philip Marlowe: Hm.
- General Sternwood: What does that mean?
- Philip Marlowe: [laughing] It means, "Hm!"
- General Sternwood: You may smoke, too. I can still enjoy the smell of it. Nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy. You're looking, sir, at a very dull survival of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
- Philip Marlowe: Thanks for the drink, general.
- General Sternwood: I enjoyed your drink as much as you did, sir.
- General Sternwood: If I seem a bit sinister as a parent, Mr. Marlowe, it's because my hold on life is too slight to include any Victorian hypocrisy. I need hardly add that any man who has lived as I have and who indulges, for the first time, in parenthood, at my age, deserves all he gets.
- General Sternwood: I assume they have all the usual vices, besides those they've invented for themselves.