At the time of Howard Hawks’ 1946 noir, their second screen pairing, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were already well into their legendary offscreen romance. (No matter that Bogie already had a wife, and Betty was a quarter-century his junior.) The plot, taken from a Raymond Chandler detective novel (William Faulkner punched up the dialogue), is famously convoluted; just know that Bogart’s sardonic PI, Philip Marlowe, gets pulled into a messy web of blackmail and murder by Bacall’s husky-voiced problem client. In any case, it’s the chemistry that counts, and theirs was electric. They married a few months after the shoot. – Kimberley Jones
