Ray must have been after the corrosive core of doubt and mistrust at the center of Dorothy B. Hughes’s most pathological novel (1947) when he took on Andrew Solt’s terrific adaptation. Hughes’s riveting story about Dix Steele, a serial killer trolling the streets of Los Angeles for women, was discarded like one of the novel’s many victims. Still, this repurposing of Dix (Humphrey Bogart) as a faltering Hollywood scriptwriter with anger management problems churns up the same unsettling suspicions for those around him. Dix falls deeply for his neighbor (Gloria Grahame), and Ray plays his bipolar moods off of each other, a brand of wracked romance that is equal measures love and fear.