It just sounds like the title to a great film noir movie, right? It’s weighed down with secrets and betrayals, gunshots, and curls of cigarette smoke.

Well, the film lives up to its title. The 1947 Robert Mitchum thriller has got it all: femme fatales, sneering mobsters (the main one deliciously played by Kirk Douglas) and, of course, the beating heart of any good noir: a moral dilemma. 

The film’s driving force is the difficult choice between a good woman or a bad one. (It’s a more difficult choice to make that you might think.) Mitchum’s character, Jeff, appears to be a simple mechanic in love with a good girl, until he’s recognized by a passing mobster. He’s forced to reveal his past, that he’s actually a former New York P.I. who was hired by a crime boss to find his missing girlfriend, a vivacious redhead named Kathie. Jeff found her, all right, but he fell in love with her. And stayed passionately in love, right up until the point she murdered his partner and disappeared into the night.

At that point, Douglas’s mobster manipulates Jeff into a rather complex scheme (I didn’t really follow the details), but the main twist is that Jeff is suddenly reunited with Kathie, who is back to being the mobster’s moll. Will Jeff abandon his current girl to fall again into Kathie’s arms? That’s the basic moral dilemma.

The movie is the 1947 equivalent of an erotic thriller, like “Body Heat” or “Basic Instinct”. The sex, of course, is all cameras panning out of the bedroom or fading to black. 

There’s an interesting structure to the story in that it’s told in flashback for the first third or so, before catching up to “real time.”

The actors are terrific. (I couldn’t help but notice how much Mitchum looks like Jeremy Allen White from the TV show “Shameless”.) 

The dialogue is tight and snappy. Noted pulp author James Cain (“Mildred Pierce”, “Double Indemnity”) is listed as a screenwriter.

It comes down to this: can you trust a dame?