Overview
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.
MovieMagicScore Overview
Auto-generatedRobert Siodmak directs this 1946 crime mystery thriller that opens with two hit men arriving to kill a resigned ex-boxer who offers no resistance, then unravels the question of why through an insurance investigator's probe into his past, a tangle involving a captivating woman and a long-ago robbery. A definitive piece of film noir, it trades in fatalism, betrayal and shadow-soaked dread, told through a fractured, flashback-driven structure. Carrying a MagicMovieScore of 7.3, it is essential viewing for noir devotees and classic-cinema fans drawn to doomed antiheroes, femmes fatales and intricate mysteries about how a man comes to meet his end.
An automated summary to help you decide what to watch — not a user review or critic rating.
Trailer
Top Cast
Edmond O'Brien
Jim Reardon
Burt Lancaster
'Swede' Andersen
Ava Gardner
Kitty Collins
Albert Dekker
Big Jim Colfax
Sam Levene
Lt. Sam Lubinsky
Vince Barnett
Charleston
Virginia Christine
Lilly Harmon Lubinsky
Jack Lambert
'Dum-Dum' Clarke
430 ratings. The score is reasonably stable but could shift up to 0.11 as more ratings come in.
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Movie Info
Release Date
August 30, 1946
Runtime
1h 43m
Genres
Crime, Mystery, Thriller
Director