The Big Sleep doesn’t quite have the stark and shadowy photography of Side Street, the blistering dialogue of Double Indemnity, or the somber fatalism of a Nicholas Ray film, but I always think of it as the noiriest of noir films. Certainly its visuals are steeped in shadows, its dialogue is a veritable parade of the finest repartee, replete with innuendo and non-sequiturs of the wittiest sort, and its narrative has a touch of fatal inevitability. But beyond all this, what makes it so charmingly noiry is its wholehearted, playful embrace of its genre trappings. Rather than focusing on one particular, idiosyncratic feature of its genre, or trying to put its own spin on the genre, it seizes on every genre trope it can find. It’s all witty dialogue, shadowy criminals, stoic private detectives and femme fatales; everything else just fills the cracks in between. Only five years after The Maltese Falcon spun a narrative web around a MacGuffin, The Big Sleep construed its entire plot as a MacGuffin—a seemingly endless series of narrative convolutions executed with winking indifference to viewer comprehension, existing solely as movements of genre elements, rearrangements of characters to afford new encounters between Bogart’s fedora-ed and trench-coated detective Marlowe and an array of sultry, slimy, glitzy, or wistfully corrupt characters.
All of this might be dismissed as filmmaking by rote if each of the genre elements was not so perfectly executed. Bogart’s drawn face and cynical manner is immediately iconic, indelibly defining the noir detective. The dialogue is dazzling in its almost Marxian (Groucho, that is) absurdity:
Phillip Marlowe: I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners, I don’t like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.
Eddie Mars: Your story didn’t sound quite right.
Philip Marlowe: Oh, that’s too bad. You got a better one?
Each of Marlowe’s series of encounters, of which the film’s structure consists, is perfectly timed, quickly sketching the essence of the characters and a relationship between them and Marlowe, and then moving onto the next encounter at a jaunty pace. (My favorite of these encounters is one of the first, in which Marlowe is hired by a crippled, embittered old man in a conservatory. Wrapped in his blanket in the heat of the hothouse, spouting gothic grotesqueries like “[orchids] flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption,” the old man seems the morbid patriarch of a Faulkner novel (not coincidentally, Faulkner worked on the screenplay). He slumps like a defeated guardian of corruption, wishing he could accompany Marlowe into the sordid world of film noir.) Perhaps most important of all is the sense of casual, easy charm that Hawks brings to each scene—in particular, the interactions between Bogart and Bacall are filled with effortless camaraderie and romance—which makes the gleeful abandon of narrative, the wholesale embrace of genre iconography, endlessly entertaining.
existentialism is a film 
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