Between her steamy debut in To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), Lauren Bacall plays a beautiful, bored rich girl in search of a sense of purpose who teams up with Charles Boyer’s concert pianist-turned-undercover agent to fight fascism in the shadows of London. Of the two categories Greene sorted his works into, “entertainments” and “Catholic novels,” his novel The Confidential Agent is the former: a romantic thriller he hoped would be the more profitable counterpart Catholic-themed The Power and Glory which he penned the same year and suspected would sell poorly. Hopes were also high in Hollywood when the acclaimed book was adapted, yet its reception was decidedly lackluster. Greene, however, ignored the critics and praised the film for its uncommon faithfulness to his book.