理查德(凯文·詹森斯 Kevin Janssens 饰)、斯坦(文森特·科隆布 Vincent Colombe 饰)和迪米特里(纪尧姆·布谢德 Guillaume Bouchède 饰)每年都要在荒漠中集结,进行打猎活动,今年亦是如此,和往年不同的是,这一次,理查德把自己的情妇珍(玛蒂尔达·鲁茨 Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz 饰)也带来了。 珍是一个风情万种美艳不可方物的女人,她的一举一动都让斯坦和迪米特里感到心里痒痒的。第二天早晨,斯坦终于按捺不住强暴了珍。当珍将这件事情告诉理查德之后,后者非但没有替她主持公道,还将她推下悬崖想要毁灭证据包庇好友。命大的珍并没有死,鬼门关里走了一遭之后,她痛定思痛,决心复仇。
Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a worn-out private detective, is hired to look for a 16-year-old girl who has run away from the luxury home of her mother, formerly a small-time actress in Los Angeles. The more the weary cynic tries to get under the surface of the seemingly simple case, the harder it is for him to find his bearings among the lies and deceptions that surround him. Eight years after the key New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunited to collaborate on what was to become one of the most undervalued films of the decade. Like Polanski in Chinatown or Altman in The Long Goodbye, in his revisionist film noir, Penn also allows the 1940s classic genre to pervade the complex reality of the 1970s. The feelings of bitterness and emptiness in the modern Chandleresque protagonist originate not only in the “public” sphere of the strange, increasingly convoluted case, but in his private life as well (boyhood trauma, a broken marriage). As Moseby remarks of a sporting event, “nobody’s winning … one side is just losing slower than the other.”