This quintessential, slick film noir of underworld intrigue, betrayal, and passion was filled with complex flashbacks; it featured Robert Mitchum as the doomed, double-crossed ex-private eye Jeff Markham with a sordid past who fell for the icy, dark, deadly, and chameleon-like brunette femme fatale Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) he was trailing for ruthless gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), after she had stolen $40,000 and fled to Mexico; the self-indulgent, lethal, and erotic enchantress was the object of romantic fascination for both men; Jeff memorably described how he first met the seductive femme fatale (when she first appeared in the film and walked into his life) dressed in white but casting a sultry silhouette as she entered from the bright white, hazy outdoors into a dark Mexican cantina ("And then I saw her, coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn't care about that forty grand"); he was mesmerized and infatuated by the dark-haired beauty (seemingly so innocent) with a broad-brimmed, white hat - unaware of her lethal charms at the beginning of their ill-fated affair; they shared a romantic interlude on the beach in the moonlight (framed by entrapping fishing nets); both wanted to escape from the past, but couldn't deny its grip upon them, as Jeff soon learned the dangers of falling in love with her ("You're like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another"); after she killed Whit, she told Jeff: "Don't you see, you've only me to make deals with now" with his laconic reply: "Build my gallows high, baby," and she continued: "You're no good for anyone but me. You're no good and neither am I. That's why we deserve each other" (after which they shared a kiss); in the final dramatic sequence of the film, she saw a roadblock trap and realized that Jeff has capitulated to the authorities and set her up; destined to die together for their sins, she viciously pulled out a gun and cried: "You dirty, double-crossing rat"; Kathie shot Jeff dead in the driver's seat, firing her gun into his crotch; she was gunned down by a barrage of police fire as their out-of-control car crashed into the roadblock

Renoir's moody, nightmarish erotic melodrama was a psychological character study about a tormented love triangle (the director's final American film during wartime exile); the film was severely edited by RKO, leaving it as only a fragment of what it could have been; shell-shocked Coast Guard veteran Lieutenant Scott Burnett (Robert Ryan) was stationed near a desolate California coastline during recuperation from post-traumatic stress, although engaged to wholesome local girl Eve Geddes (Nan Leslie), he became distracted and smitten in an illicit affair with slutty and passionate femme fatale Peggy Butler (Joan Bennett), who was married to renowned blind painter Tod (Charles Bickford) and lived in an isolated clifftop house with him; she was obsessively guilt-ridden within her unhappy, imprisoning, embittered and dysfunctional love-hate marriage to the excessively-jealous, wife-beating man, believing she had to stay with him because she had caused her husband's blindness (by cutting his optic nerve) during a drunken brawl; the Lieutenant took it upon himself to prove that the blindness was faked ("If I could prove to you that Tod wasn’t really blind, would you leave him?") and in one extraordinary scene led the painter along a cliffside to prove his disability; in the ambiguous ending, when Peggy proved her love to Scott (although her past as a nymphomaniacal seductress was revealed - "Go ahead and say it, I'm no good"), Tod freed her by burning down their house ("I am free"), consuming all of his paintings, and then departed to go to New York with her to start a new life, leaving Scott free to return to Eve