Like in every great film noir, you can tell from the start that everyone here is doomed. You can feel it in the shadows. Not even the snappy, witty dialogue can light up this darkness. Robert Mitchum is doomed as a former private detective who went into hiding after he fell in love with a rich crime boss’s woman only to see his affair with her end badly. Kirk Douglas is doomed as the crime boss who lost his lady and then got her back, but you know she doesn’t really love him. And Jane Greer, angelically beautiful here, is doomed as the classic femme fatale whose loyalties change every five minutes. 
The plot winds around so many corners that you might lose it from time to time, particularly in the last half-hour, but all you really need to know is that it’s a love-triangle story at heart, with one man (Mitchum) a reluctant part of it and the other man (Douglas) out for revenge via a murder frame-up scheme.
It’s the first great film directed by Jacques Tourneur since RKO moved him on to more prestigious projects following his work on the best of Val Lewton’s pack of low-budget horror jobs from a few years previous. Tourneur brings along cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, another former Lewton collaborator and one of the masters of moody noir shadow worlds, who provides one sexy and sumptuous image after another. Daniel Mainwaring (under the name Geoffrey Homes) writes the screenplay, an adaptation of his own novel, Build My Gallows High.