After being hired to find an ex-con's former girlfriend, Philip Marlowe is drawn into a deeply complex web of mystery and deceit.
Three friends discover a mysterious machine that takes pictures 24 hours into the future and conspire to use it for personal gain, until disturbing and dangerous images begin to develop.
In New York, a gambler is challenged to take a cold female missionary to Havana, but they fall for each other, and the bet has a hidden motive to finance a crap game.
A mad bomber holds an innocent family hostage.
The young scion of a rich lineage should get married and give an heir to the family. But no one wants to touch his girlfriend before marriage and instead consoled with the beautiful waitress. But things get complicated and suddenly strange deaths begin to hit the family members.
Four socialites unexpectedly clash: heiress Brooke Carter runs into gambler Johnny Spanish at the race track while playboy Michael O. Pritchard nearly runs into stage star Kitty O'Kelly with his car. Backstage at Kitty's show, it turns out she and Brooke are old friends who attended public school together. The foursome do the town, accompanied by Brooke's companion Elizabeth, who throws herself at Michael's butler and chauffeur Rodney James.
Locked in her cell, a murderer reflects on the events that have led her to death row.
After being found wandering the streets of Los Angeles, a severely catatonic woman tells a doctor the complex story of how she wound up there.
Tells the story of one day in the lives of the various people who populate a police detective squad. An embittered cop, Det. Jim McLeod, leads a precinct of characters in their grim daily battle with the city's lowlife. The characters who pass through the precinct over the course of the day include a young petty embezzler, a pair of burglars, and a naive shoplifter.
Two seemingly happily married French couples are forced to contend with a number of issues.
Haunted by memories of his father murdering a family, Arlis Sweeney prefers to keep to himself, focusing his energy on his work. One day, the traumatic past that eats away at him returns when he meets Kay Davies, a woman connected to the bloody event. Against all odds, Arlis and Kay fall in love; however, when his father, Roy, reappears in his life -- with the coldhearted Ginnie in tow -- Arlis must deal with his past demons.
A newly appointed high school teacher begins her job hoping for a fresh start, but her life takes an unsettling turn when a troubled student becomes fixated on her. As boundaries blur and personal and professional lines are tested, the situation escalates, forcing her to confront the consequences of desire, power, and responsibility.
In a moment of madness a middle-aged, married and respectable pharmacist kills a young woman who is sun-bathing by a lake. Unable to take in what he has done, he flees from the scene of the crime and behaves as if nothing has happened. Eventually her boyfriend is charged with the crime and, in a strange twist of fate, the killer finds himself serving on the jury.
After a former model is drowned in her bathtub, Detective James Halloran and Lieutenant Dan Muldoon attempt to piece together her murder.
A falsely convicted man's wife, Catherine, and an alcoholic composer and pianist, Martin, team up in an attempt to clear her husband of the murder of a blonde singer, who is Martin's wife.
Daisy Kenyon is a Manhattan commercial artist having an affair with an arrogant and overbearing but successful lawyer and family man named Dan O'Mara. Daisy meets a single man, a war veteran named Peter Lapham, and after a brief and hesitant courtship decides to marry him, although she is still in love with Dan.
A newspaper publisher, wanting to prove a point about the insufficiency of circumstantial evidence, talks his possible son-in-law Tom into a hoax in an attempt to expose ineptitude of the city's hard-line district attorney. The plan is to have Tom plant clues leading to his arrest for killing a female nightclub dancer. Once Tom is found guilty, he is to reveal the setup and humiliate the DA.
Petty crook and cop-killer Martin Rome, in bad shape from wounds in the hospital prison ward, still refuses to help slimy lawyer Niles clear his client by confessing to another crime. Police Lt. Candella must check Niles' allegation; a friend of the Rome family, he walks a tightrope between sentiment and cynicism. When Martin fears Candella will implicate his girlfriend Teena, he'll do anything to protect her. How many others will he drag down to disaster with him?
The life of Al Roberts, a pianist in a New York nightclub, turns into a nightmare when he decides to hitchhike to Los Angeles to visit his girlfriend.
This titillating bit of pulp sensationalism was the last in a string of "B" films that Cleo Moore starred in at Columbia. Moore plays Lila Crane, an ambitious clip-joint floozie turned photographer with flexible morals and a penchant for fast money.