"I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me." A line concocted by dried-up Hollywood writer Dixon Steele (Bogart) while riding in a car at night with Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame). It encapsulates what this heartbreaking and elegantly crafted noir film is about. I don't think any movie has explored with such harrowing grit and bleakness a doomed relationship, one that ends with a whimper not a bang. There's none of the usual tropes to sugarcoat the subject matter. It's an intelligent adult story about two people with escalating tension and twists. We start out thinking this is a noir crime mystery. Then it becomes a romance without the femme fatale or jaded noir protagonists. It has a coolness and sincerity to it with little sentimentality or sappiness in Nicholas Ray's directorial vision.

The iconic scene with Bogart in shadow with his face illuminated as he thinks up a dramatic way in which the murder of the hatcheck girl might have taken place is riveting. Like in Sierra Madre, his eyes are alight and possessed in expressionist style. We see Bogart hounded by his personal demons that get him into trouble: his violent temper and brooding nature that Bogart plays so well. Some who knew Bogart the actor really well have stated that this film was the most realistic portrayal of the man himself. He's flawed and vulnerable but finds love briefly, as does Grahame. But that lingering suspicion that he is the killer gnaws at Grahame and feeds her own paranoid delusions until the dissolution of this relationship is inevitable and beyond repair.

It ends not in operatic fashion with a violent climax, murder, or Shakespearean tragedy of one or both characters in suicide. No, this film is better than that: it ends with Bogart and Grahame realizing their relationship is poisoned forever. Simple as that. They love or loved each other, but can't trust each other. They can't go on like it had been in that brief honeymoon period before Grahame's doubts mounted or Bogart's inner demons manifested through violent altercations with his friends or strangers.

In the final scene when she's hiding the truth that she's leaving him, paranoias play out as Bogart suspects something is wrong. It's been building for a while actually. When he finds out she's afraid of him and plans to leave him, just then they get a call from the police who have been investigating whether Bogart is the main suspect for the murder of a hatcheck girl. The police captain tells Grahame he's clean and not under suspicion. Mournfully she responds "Yesterday.. this would have meant so much to us." Indeed, our hearts break for these two because we the audience see it could all be cleared up so easily: if she knew Bogart was no longer a suspect a day earlier they could have been happy. Bogart leaves the apartment broken and Grahame looks on in tears, muttering "I lived a few weeks while you loved me." The movie ends on a defeated Bogart shambling through the courtyard, his back to the camera.

Just astonishing and powerful. Every film I've seen about troubled love has nothing on this one. What makes it so haunting is that if you watch the film cold, there's no hint what this movie is: murder mystery, noir thriller, romance, biography of a Hollywood screenwriter? The film defies genre. Others find it cheesy and comically melodramatic; a bit of the Romantic still resides in me, so I was hooked on this psychological drama. It says something about tainted love with such finesse and poetry in the screenplay. Yet I wouldn't want to see this kind of subject matter in a drab, modern retelling. Bogart's and Grahame's performance in a 40s Hollywood noir style is the best delivery system for emotional impact.