I love
The Maltese Falcon. It's got everything you need: a cool, only-in-it-for-himself, star-making Bogart role that will essentially define his on-screen persona up until
Casablanca (where his on-screen character is first redeemed as a good guy at heart); it's got Mary Astor in a role that defined the noir, femme fatale character.
It features the great Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, two great actors who would be forever linked after this movie; it is the directorial debut of the great John Huston; it is a faithful representation of the novel, unlike so many movies - the only things that got cut from the novel are a subplot about Greenstreet's daughter and the homosexual overtones of Greenstreet's relationship with Wilmer, though Huston was able to sneak in the term
gunsel (the studios thought it meant “gunman”, while in actuality the term means “a young male kept as a sexual companion, especially by an older man”); the cinematography is great and groundbreaking (those upward-angled shots of Greenstreet, highlighting his enormous girth, are spectacular - no-one had ever really shot a film like that before.
Perhaps as pure noir,
The Big Sleep surpasses
Falcon, but taken purely as a film, I think that
Falcon is superior - there are too many plot holes in
The Big Sleep - even
Raymond Chandler himself said that he couldn't fully explain the story's plot .
As to
Double Indemnity, it is a great film. Edward G. Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck are superb, but Fred MacMurray? I think he's really miscast in this role - he's too stiff, too square, too, well...
Fred MacMurray.
Compare any MacMurray/Stanwyck scene with any Bogart/Bacall scene - Bogie and Bacall had amazing chemistry, their scenes virtually ooze with sex (or as close as you could get to it under the Hays Code).
On the other hand, MacMurray is downright
corny playing a Lothario, and his “sexy” dialogue falls completely flat (“
baby this” and “
baby that”). It takes me out of the film completely, and reminds me of when my dad would embarrass my brother and I by trying to sound “cool” and “hip” in the 1970s, calling black people things like “brother” -- it was SO square sounding, my brother and I would just roll our eyes, saying “... oh,
dad..!” 
For my money, Fred MacMurray playing a “sexy” role is like having Stephen Hawking play a tough guy role - it just doesn't
work. For my money, even the Bogart/Martha Vickers, Bogart/Dorothy Malone scenes in
The Big Sleep absolutely demolish any “sexy” scene in
Double Indemnity in terms of
believable sexuality, and if you don't believe in the relationship in a man/woman noir, the film doesn't really have any legs to stand on.
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CORRECTION: That isn't a plant on a trellis. It's a tree too. (so three misfit trees)
I think they did one of my least favorite things to do to trees: I think they pollarded them--which means that they lopped off the largest limbs at the base of the limbs in the hopes that there would be lush growth in due course around the cut. It's a disgusting, short-sighted thing to do, because even if the tree produces the desired effect at first, it looks very strange as time goes on . . . and to get the same effect, they have to pollard it back yet further in a few years; and it basically just wastes the tree. It can perhaps be justified in orchards or in general for fruit trees, because you want to keep the tree to manageable size, and you want to restrict the amount of fruit produced because you want fewer but bigger apples, not more but smaller apples. But otherwise pollarding is a nasty thing to do to a tree.
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