This psychological, unsettling melodramatic Technicolored noir highlighted a menacing, father-fixated, unstable, and deranged, darkly alluring femme fatale named Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) who vowed to her novelist husband Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde): "I'll never let you go, never, never," stopping at nothing to make the man she loved her exclusive possession; in one scene, she expressed to him after her father's cremation and the scattering of ashes: "I can't help it. It's only because I love you so. I love you so, I can't bear to share you with anybody"; she stopped at nothing, including the drowning murder of her paraplegic brother-in-law Danny (Darryl Hickman) in a lake as she calmly watched from a nearby rowboat; she also deliberately fell down a flight of stairs to cause a miscarriage and kill her unborn child, admitting: "Sometimes the truth is wicked"; finally, she committed suicide with cyanide, implicating her half-sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain) in the death (although she was found innocent) and sending Richard to jail for two years for withholding evidence

This melodramatic post-war noir classic was a tale of greed and murder (told as a long flashback); before filling in the backstory, the film opened in a beach house with the shooting murder of Monte Baragon (Zachary Scott) by an unseen assailant, and the contemplation of suicide on a Santa Monica pier by Best Actress-winning Joan Crawford, playing suspected murderess Mildred Pierce-Beragon; possibly seen as the film's femme fatale, she set up business associate Wally Fay (Jack Carson) to return to the crime scene where her husband had been murdered; it was later revealed that Mildred - had an obsessive mother-daughter love for her venomous femme fatale daughter Veda (Ann Blyth), and had contributed to her daughter's spoiled, ungrateful, unappreciative and slutty behavior for a long time; Veda had been indulgently showered with gifts, nice clothes, and piano lessons, provided by Mildred's sacrificial baking of pies and cakes, although Veda was embarrassed by her mother's occupation: "My mother - a waitress"; in a second major confrontation on a staircase, Veda slapped Mildred after brutally insulting her mother ("...you'll never be anything but a common frump, whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing. With this money, I can get away from every rotten, stinking thing that makes me think of this place or you!"), after which Mildred threatened: "Get out before I kill you"; Veda's outrageous behavior went much further; she faked a pregnancy to extort money from her boyfriend's wealthy family, took a job as a singer/dancer in a sleazy nightclub, coerced her mother into marrying Monte Baragon (with whom she was having a semi-incestuous affair), and continued to treat her mother condescendingly; in the end, Veda was revealed to be the killer, when Monte confronted her: "You don't really think I could be in love with a rotten little tramp like you, do you?"; as Veda was led away at the police station, she asserted to her mother: "Don't worry about me, Mother. I'll get by"

Fritz Lang's steamy and fatalistic film was one of the moodiest, blackest thrillers ever made; it told about a meek, middle-aged cashier and unhappily-married, hen-pecked husband and amateur painter named Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson); he unwittingly fell into a cruel trap set by cold-hearted, amoral femme fatale gold-digger and Greenwich Village streetwalker Katherine "Kitty" March (Joan Bennett) and her abusive, slick and mercenary boyfriend-pimp Johnny (Dan Duryea); he first met Kitty when she was being beaten up by Johnny on a rainy night, and they got to know each other in a bar for a late-night drink - he was immediately entranced by the clear plastic raincoat-wearing sexy dame; she led Cross to commit embezzlement, impersonated him in order to sell his paintings, and was deceitful and cruel to him - causing him in a fit of jealous anger to murder by stabbing her with an ice-pick through her bed covers, after he proposed marriage and she told him: "Oh, you idiot! How can a man be so dumb?...I've wanted to go laugh in your face ever since I first met you. You're old and ugly and I'm sick of you. Sick, sick, sick!"; the film ended with Johnny being accused of the crime, and Cross suffering humiliating disgrace, haunting psychological torment and mental anguish (i.e., a failed suicide attempt by hanging and abject homelessness as he wandered the streets); the final image was his shuffling by a 5th Avenue gallery past the portrait he had made of Kitty

Humphrey Bogart, teamed with real-life wife Lauren Bacall, played the role of private detective Philip Marlowe in this confusing, classic who-dun-it, involving blackmail, pornography, and murder in Los Angeles; Marlowe was called to the house of a new client - dying millionaire General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), where he was first confronted with the General's seductive younger daughter who threw herself at him - she was the troubled, errant, spoiled, sexually-perverse, thumb-biting/sucking, frequently doped-up nymphomaniacal heiress Carmen (Martha Vickers); she called Marlowe "not bad looking" and "cute"; Marlowe was asked by Sternwood to investigate Carmen's ostensible blackmailer - suspicious porno "rare book" dealer Arthur Gwynn Geiger (Theodore von Eltz) on North Sunset, who was blackmailing Sternwood over "gambling debts" incurred by his youngest daughter [the exact nature of the blackmail was not clear, though it may be that it wasn't gambling debts, but that Geiger had illicit, nude, incriminating or obscene photographs of Carmen and threatened to circulate them]; on the way out, Marlowe also met Vivian Sternwood Rutledge (Lauren Bacall), the General's other daughter, who was suspicious of him but protective of her sister; within a short while, Marlowe found an incoherent, stupefied, drugged-up, Chinese-dress wearing Carmen sitting idly nearby a dead man - the dead blackmailer was probably taking pornographic pictures of Carmen in his home; returning Carmen to her home, he again met Vivian, who accused him of duping him: "You go too far, Marlowe" since she wanted Marlowe off the case because he might find something else suspicious [namely, gangster Eddie Mars' (Joe Ridgely) additional blackmailing scheme against Vivian regarding her sister]; at this point in the film, Vivian engaged in a famous, slyly flirtatious, sexy horse-race conversation with Marlowe in which she asserted: "A lot depends on who's in the saddle"; soon after, Vivian joined forces with Marlowe to turn the tables on Mars, end the blackmail scheme, and acquire treatment for her sick sister Carmen