"Nicholas Ray directed this brooding melodrama that is part Freudian character study and part anti-Hollywood screed. Humphrey Bogart has one of his finest roles as weary and hard-drinking screenwriter Dixon Steele, who hasn't been able to write a hit screenplay for years. It has been rumored that he had beaten up his former girlfriend and has a bad reputation for getting into fights. His agent, Mel Lippmann (Art Smith) gets him an assignment to adapt a novel. Dixon doesn't want to read the book so he asks hat check girl Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart), who has read the book, to come over to his apartment to tell him the story. After she relates the tale to him, he sends her to a taxi stand. The next morning he is informed by police detective Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy) that Mildred was strangled and thrown from a moving car. Because Dixon shows no emotion when he is told of the murder, police captain Lochner (Carl Benton Reid) thinks Dixon is the killer. But Dixon's neighbor, aspiring actress Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) vouches for Dixon, saying that she saw Mildred leave the apartment alone. Attracted to Laurel, Dixon and Laurel become lovers and Dixon tows the line --he stops drinking and starts writing. But the on-going investigation puts a damper on the relationship. Finally, feeling he is being hounded, Dixon reverts to his violent tendencies. Laurel, frightened of Dixon, agrees when Dixon proposes marriage to her, but she is secretly planning to arrange a flight to New York to escape Dixon and the fetid Hollywood atmosphere."