This is one of the most powerful and influential thrillers ever made, with director Robert Siodmak's lovingly bleak and pessimistic tone virtually defining the term film noir. Based on a short story of remarkable power by Ernest Hemingway, the movie opens with a murder and then seeks, through intricate flashbacks, to explain why the victim was so accepting - welcoming, even - of his fate. Burt Lancaster, all coiled anger as the fall guy, makes a stunning film debut and there's a career-defining role for Ava Gardner as the femme fatale. In fact, there's class all round: the Edward Hopper-influenced design is brilliantly atmospheric, Miklos Rozsa's superb score was so effective it was re-used for TV's Dragnet and John Huston had a hand in the taut screenplay. The Don Siegel remake with Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan isn't a patch on this marvellous original.

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.