The Big Sleep

Howard Hawks - 1946
Bogart-Bacall. A great noir, but also, clearly, a Hawks film. That means long takes, twos, tracking abnd panning rather than cutting about. Hawks' incredibly simple approach (by that I mean few camera set-ups, even for SRS keeping the angle) is just perfect economy of means, and adds a very specific touch to the genre. Not here the extreme cutting up of space, fast talking (the dialogue is fast, but not incomprehesibly so), but rather a sense of a place, the slow movements and twitches (ear-pulling!) of the great Bogart, the eyes of Lauren Bacall. The music is also not honking, but great.
The lighting is less stylised that, say, 'Double Indemnity' or 'The Maltese Falcon' (for me, along with this, the great noirs). In fact, the openings are relatively light, the darkness seems to rather close in.
The plot is about getting woman out of the way, Bogart as sleeping with all of them then chucking them out because he wants to be on his own. The intention is not to baffle, there are a few sum-ups, but it is, of course, still a bit of a mystery what happened. The narration, remarkably, stays with Bogart all the way; a pure example of that form.
The ending is, again, remarkable. Like Renoir, Hawks films have so much more than the straight narrative, but in a very subtle way. Here, the grim and even open-ended conclusion is, like 'Only Angels Have Wings' and 'Barbary Coast', seemingly to me a sign of Hawks pushing classicism to its limits (perhaps with the genre here), until it turns almost into arthouse uncertainty.