The archetypal private-eye thriller, with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe, trying to unravel a plot so fiendish that even the writers and director Howard Hawks didn't understand all of it, and bandying words with Lauren Bacall in some of the raciest exchanges that ever got past the censors in the immediate postwar years. Put in to replace explanatory scenes after the film was shown to the US armed forces, the Bogart-Bacall stuff improved the film but rendered its plot even more complex! A supporting cast to treasure includes Elisha Cook Jr with another of his little guys who are life's losers, former Western star Bob Steele as a cold-blooded killer and a bespectacled Dorothy Malone as a bookstore proprietress keen to show Bogart her complete stock. The plot thunders along and, like Bogart, barely seems to stop for breath between one confrontation and another.

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