Bacall to Arms film depicts a noisy movie audience member which disrupts the screening. In this case the noisy audience is represented by the wolf-whistling and howling of a wolf in the audience. The film uses caricatures of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who attempt to act out the scene from "To Have and Have Not" (1944) in which they first kiss, and her character's advice on how to whistle. Bogart eventually shoots the disruptive wolf from the movie screen, though the film within a film never properly ends. The short is one of two memorable parodies of Bogart from the Warner Bros.
Lauren Bacall not provided a quick career resurgence. "The Big Sleep" laid the foundation for her status as an icon of film noir. She would be strongly associated with the genre for the rest of her career, and would often be cast as variations of the independent and sultry femme fatale character of Vivian she played in the movie. As described by film scholar Joe McElhaney, "Vivian displays an almost total command of movement and gesture. She never crawls." Bacall was cast with Bogart in two more films. In "Dark Passage" (1947), another film noir, she played an enigmatic San Francisco artist.