Detective Mark McPherson investigates the killing of Laura, found dead on her apartment floor before the movie starts. McPherson builds a mental picture of the dead girl from the suspects whom he interviews.
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J.J. Hunsceker (Burt Lancaster), is a tyrannical Broadway columnist for the New York Globe who rules his demimonde with the press’s power to create or destroy. Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), is the hustling publicist who is consumed by desperate ambition and hates himself because of it; he will do anything to gain the admiration of Hunsceker (”My experience, in brief, is dog eat dog.”)
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The Ox-Bow Incident takes place in Nevada in 1885 and begins with Art Croft (Harry Morgan) and Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) riding into the town of Bridger’s Wells.
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Young Charlie Newton not only shares a name with her favorite uncle, but a special bond. At times she feels the charming man is the only one who understands her need to be extordinary and that she is better than the tiny town she lives in.
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Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) marries and murders widows for their money, believing he is helping God do away with women who arouse men’s carnal instincts.
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Ex-convict Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) tells his girl friend, Fay (Coleen Gray), he has plans for making money, and indeed he has. He rounds up a gang and brings them in on a seemingly fool-proof scheme to rob a race track of $200,000.
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In a French provincial town, Michel Delassalle, a sadistic headmaster of a school belonging to his wife Christina, a fragile young woman with a weak heart, carries on an affair with Nicole Horner, a strong, forceful teacher who has been his mistress from the day she arrived.
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First, the Raymond Chandler novel: he took hold of LA like it was one of those glass balls of a winter scene filled with water - he turned it upside down and shook it well, then put it back down and described the action.
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Because her father was a German spy who has committed suicide in prison, Government agent T.R. Devlin recruits Alicia Huberman to become an undercover agent. She has fallen in love with Devlin and is trying to repay her father’s moral debt to America, the country she loves and feels her father has betrayed.
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Tennis star Guy Haines meets a stranger on the Washington-to-New York train who offers to exchange murders. The stranger, Bruno Anthony, will kill Guy’s estranged wife if Guy will kill Bruno’s hated father. Guy doesn’t take Bruno seriously until his wife, Miriam, is found murdered in an amusement park. Guy becomes the chief suspect, which threatens his tennis career;
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