Perhaps the best private-eye movie made in the Forties, when competition was stiffest. The idiomatic narration and dialogue are no doubt funnier now, in unintended ways, than they once were, but Robert Mitchum's narcotized delivery preserves some of the poetry, too. More immune to time's passage is the visual poetry, the leafy shadows of Nicholas Musuraca's photography and the hypnotic rhythms of Jacques Tourneur's direction. The narration, in any event, breaks off halfway through, after we have been brought up to date and have emerged from flashback. At that point, a hauntingly lingered-over image, of Mitchum suited up in standard P.I. trenchcoat and handsomely framed by a wrought-iron gate, commences the movie's smoothest stretch, as the forces of fate close in for the kill. With Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas; screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring (a.k.a. Geoffrey Homes), adapted from his novel, Build My Gallows High. (1947) — Duncan Shepherd