Peter Falk plays a worldly, cynical gumshoe who takes on San Francisco, thugs, crooks, Nazis, femme fatales and the Golden Gate Bridge in this tribute to Bogie and the Hammett/Chandler school of hard-boiled detectives.

Detective Sam Spade goes in search of a priceless statuette after the death of his partner.

It started with the murder of Kinsey Millhone's sometime drinking buddy, an insurance claims adjuster. But before long Kinsey stumbles onto a massive insurance scam. Going undercover as a wisecracking vamp, Millhone descends into the Los Angeles nether world of machismo and gang hideouts. Her companion, terrified at having crossed the violent crook Raymond Maldonado, is Bibianna Diaz--no Girl Scout herself.

For The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman successfully transports Philip Marlowe, incarnated by Elliott Gould, to the over-privileged, full-color 70s. Marlowe is lonely and shabby, yet does not seem an anachronism in the contemporary world. Unlike Bogart's Marlowe, this is a not especially tough Marlowe. He's a bright, conscientiously solemn nut, a guy who hopes for the best but expects the worst. This particular Philip Marlowe, despite evidence to the...

Matt Scudder is an ex-NYPD cop who now works as an unlicensed private investigator operating just outside the law. When Scudder agrees to help a heroin trafficker hunt down the men who kidnapped and then brutally murdered his wife, the PI learns that this is not the first time these men have committed this sort of twisted crime, nor will it be the last. Blurring the lines between right and wrong, Scudder races to track the deviants through the backstreets...