This quintessential film-noir catapulted contract player Robert Mitchum into superstardom and set the standard for the genre for years to come. Boasting a typically confusing and convoluted plot line, the film follows laconic private eye Jeff Bailey [Mitchum] as he is lured into a fateful quagmire when hired by notorious gangster Whit Sterling [Kirk Douglas] to find his mistress, Kathie Moffett [Jane Greer], who shot him and ran off with $40,000. Jeff traces Kathie to Mexico, but when he meets the seductive femme fatale he falls in love with her and willingly becomes involved in a complicated web of double-crosses, blackmail, and murder. Directed with supreme skill by Jacques Tourneur and brilliantly photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, this is an unrelentingly gloomy film set in a dark world of greed and deceit where love is just another device to ensnare the gullible. It was here that Mitchum created what became his iconographic screen persona: the droopy-eyed cynic who accepts fate with a studied nonchalance. Jane Greer is equally superb, perfecting the role of the femme fatale with a combination of erotic fire and cool detachment. Her first appearance in the film - cutting a sultry silhouette as she enters a dark cantina from the bright white outdoors - is one of the great entrances in film history. [TV Guide]