(1947, b/w) Tough as nails, cool as ice, Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), formerly a New York City private detective, has a new identity as Jeff Bailey, owner of a gas station in Bridgeport, California, to get away from his former life. By taking an interest in a local girl, Ann Miller (Virginia Huston), he's lit a fuse in Jim (Richard Webb), her long-time admirer. However, when an acquaintance from his former life, Joe Stephanos, chances upon him, Jeff has a lot more to be worried about (though he doesn't show it) than a jealous, small-town rival.

Jeff tells Ann, as he drives with her up to Lake Tahoe to meet Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), about how he and his partner Jack Fisher were hired three years earlier by Whit, a mobster, to track down Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who'd shot him and absconded with $40,000.

On his own, following her to Acapulco, Mexico, smart and honest Jeff finds her and falls in love, passing days "like cigarettes smoked" and evenings in romance. Believing her, that she hated Whit but didn't steal his money, they narrowly escape Whit's surprise visit, taking a steamer together to San Francisco.

But Jack has picked up the scent, so Jeff heads south to LA, leaving Kathie behind; thinking he'd lost Jack, Jeff meets Kathie in a secluded cabin, where Jack has tailed her. Fisher, convinced they have Whit's money, attempts to blackmail them. Jeff explains to Ann how he buried his erstwhile partner's body and hasn't seen Kathie since.

Snappy dialogue with most scenes taking place after dark, director Jacques Tourneur's dramatic, suspenseful film noir is mysterious and murky, like a fog off the bay, from a screenplay by Geoffrey Homes, adapting his own novel, Build My Gallows High.

"You build my gallows high, baby," Jeff says to Kathie, after realizing he's the fall guy in a frame up. "Someone has to take the blame," she answers: "You're no good, and neither am I."

Wearing a trench coat and fedora, smoking a cigarette, Jeff has once again found himself in Whit's employ (a clever accountant, Leonard Eels, is trying to blackmail Whit for evasion of income taxes) with Kathie back in the fold "like a leaf that blows from one gutter to another."

To make good on his previous double cross, Jeff goes back to the city on the bay to retrieve a briefcase containing the incriminating documents, posing as the cousin of Eels's secretary, Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming), who criticizes him for his awkward way with Eels. "That's one way to be clever, act like an idiot," he tells her, of whom he says to Petey, a hack driver, she's "awfully cold around the heart." That coldness is contagious when sneezed from a gun, permanently freezing several hearts.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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