This is a quite complicated movie to follow, that features lots of characters, sidetracks, different motives and twist and turns. It will make your head spin at times and it's really a movie you have to keep paying attention to, in order not to understand things anymore. It's for example quite hard to understand who killed who and what all the motives are behind them. The movie is basically the one infringement after the other, in which the one covers for the other, until you're simply not able to follow it all anymore.
It's a great example of the genre though and the class of the director Howard Hawks and the actor Humphrey Bogart make sure that the movie will keep you interest throughout. It really has all of the ingredients you could expect, such as lying double crossing characters, a plot that thickens and thickens and of course a femme fatale, in this case more than one as well.
You could say that despite it's complexity it's still a well written and constructed story. The movie not in the least also features some great tough dialog, that really fit the genre and the atmosphere these type of movies always have over them.
It's a real film-noir with plenty of mystery and thriller elements to it. It also features some action as well and of course a sniff of romance, when Bogart and Bacall once more fall in love in a movie. The sequence filled with loads of sexual innuendo really jumps of the screen and is really quite amazing for an 1946 movie. Lots of directors now days would have difficulties placing such a sequence in a movie.
A true great example of the genre, despite of its complexity.
8/10
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