Raymond Chandler's tangled web of deception, murder and blackmail - immortalised in the 1946 Humphrey Bogart version - is here unhappily transferred by director Michael Winner to an English seaside setting, with an all-star cast which looks as if it had (hastily) learned its lines the previous night. The acting would scarcely grace your local rep, ranging from passable (Robert Mitchum as an unusually elegant Philip Marlowe) all the way down to pathetic (Candy Clark in a performance that, in the old studio days, would have had 'cancelled contract' written all over it). Even that sensual actress Sarah Miles is rendered limp and ineffective. Action-wise, the film is far too static. Like its overweight and overage hero, it never moves as a thriller should, lurching ponderously from one lacklustre location to another. Perhaps the first real decline in the director's once-sparkling career.

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