Offbeat, but elegantly made mystery story, based on Vera Caspary’s novel, in which a flawed police detective develops a perverse fixation on the beautiful dead woman whose murder he works to solve. The less revealed about the plot the better, but there are some great twists that earn this a place among the best of 1940s film noir even as it snubs a few basic noir conventions. For one thing, while it’s got a perfect hard-boiled detective—an intense, haunted Dana Andrews—the rest of its characters are hoity-toity upper crust types rather than seedy lowlifes. It also deals little in shadowy cinematography. Instead, it’s set in the brightly lit, opulent apartments of heirs and executives.
Producer Otto Preminger took over as director after he fired Rouben Mamoulian over disagreements on everything from the casting to the famous portrait of Gene Tierney that’s on display in her apartment (trivia note: the “painting” in the film is actually a photograph touched up to look like a painting). Mamoulian claimed in at least one interview to have completed 75% of the movie, which most sources say that Preminger scrapped completely and started over.