The peaceful life of a gas station owner is disrupted when a man from his past arrives in town and forces him to return to the dark world he had tried to escape.
In the late 1940s, a murderous couple known as the 'The Lonely Hearts Killers' kills close to a dozen people. Two detectives try to nab the duo who find their targets via the personals in the paper.
An insurance representative is seduced by a dissatisfied housewife into a scheme of insurance fraud and murder that arouses the suspicion of his colleague, a claims investigator.
The rise and inevitable fall of an amoral but naive young woman whose insouciant eroticism inspires lust and violence in those around her.
Private eye Jake Gittes lives off of the murky moral climate of sunbaked, pre-World War II Southern California. Hired by a beautiful socialite to investigate her husband's extra-marital affair, Gittes is swept into a maelstrom of double dealings and deadly deceits, uncovering a web of personal and political scandals that come crashing together.
Joe Velasco is awarded parole for good behavior, promising to live life as a reformed man and avoid the underworld activities which landed him in jail. But almost immediately following his release, a series of occurrences begin to steer him back towards the road to ruin.
The life of a respected British politician at the height of his career crumbles when he becomes obsessed with his son's lover.
The sensuous wife of a lunch wagon proprietor and a rootless drifter begin a sordidly steamy affair and conspire to murder her Greek husband.
An unknown middle-aged batter named Roy Hobbs with a mysterious past appears out of nowhere to take a losing 1930s baseball team to the top of the league.
Nick Johnson has wed several times, but all his rich wives were 'accidentally' killed after some time. Now he's married a young Italian widow, but she's not so easy to get rid of, especially when she learns of his plans and tries to turn the tables.
A revenge-seeking gold digger marries a womanizing Beverly Hills lawyer with the intention of making a killing in the divorce.
Sophie, a quiet and shy maid working for an upper-class French family, finds a friend in the energetic and uncompromising postmaster Jeanne, who encourages her to stand up against her bourgeois employers.
After being hired to find an ex-con's former girlfriend, Philip Marlowe is drawn into a deeply complex web of mystery and deceit.
Sergeant Carlos Olivarez (Buck Jones) becomes entangled in the machinations of an oil baron, havoc-wreaking bandits, and the femme fatale who ruined his brother.
When her American lover visits London, a wealthy woman’s jealous husband hatches a plan to murder her and inherit her fortune.
A young mother, Mildred, doesn't know that her husband Walter is cheating on her. One night she attends a party with a friend of her husband's, and the man gets drunk and begins groping her when they get home. Her husband sees this and uses it as an excuse to sue his wife for divorce. In the ensuing trial he wins, due to fraudulent evidence, and gets custody of the child. Complications ensue.
Mildred Harker loses custody of her child in a messy divorce settlement. Leaving her hometown in disgrace, Mildred heads to New York, where after a crash course in the school of hard knocks she joins the chorus of a Ziegfeld-like musical revue. Now a full-fledged gold-digger, she enjoys the favors of backstage johnnies and elderly sugar daddies, but finally finds true love in the form of Park Avenue socialite Ted Willing.
Two hit men walk into a diner asking for a man called "the Swede". When the killers find the Swede, he's expecting them and doesn't put up a fight. Since the Swede had a life insurance policy, an investigator, on a hunch, decides to look into the murder. As the Swede's past is laid bare, it comes to light that he was in love with a beautiful woman who may have lured him into pulling off a bank robbery overseen by another man.
A tobacco planter on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean becomes engaged through correspondence to a French woman he does not know. The woman that arrives does not look like the picture he received, but he marries her anyway.
Three detectives in the corrupt and brutal L.A. police force of the 1950s use differing methods to uncover a conspiracy behind the shotgun slayings of the patrons at an all-night diner.