[1] It follows a war hero, Warren Murdock (Bogart), who begins investigating the death of his best friend and fellow soldier, Johnny Drake (Prince).

Filming took place in the summer of 1946, largely on Columbia soundstages in Los Angeles, with location shoots occurring in St. Petersburg, Florida; Biloxi, Mississippi; Philadelphia, and New York City.

A flashback follows: Just after World War II, paratroopers and close friends Murdock and Sergeant Johnny Drake are mysteriously ordered to travel from Paris to Washington, D.C..

When Drake learns that he is to be awarded the Medal of Honor (and Murdock the Distinguished Service Cross), he flees before newspaper photographers can take his picture.

Murdock goes AWOL, follows the clues and tracks his friend to Gulf City in the southern United States, where he learns Drake is dead when his burned corpse is recovered from a car crash.

Seeing Coral intentionally losing heavily at rigged roulette, Murdock not only recoups her $16,000 losses at craps, but also wins her a matching sum.

Dead Reckoning was originally intended by Columbia Pictures' production chief Harry Cohn as a vehicle for Rita Hayworth, a follow-up to the extremely popular Gilda.

However, Hayworth was in the middle of a contract dispute with Columbia, and refused to make the film, so she was replaced by Lizabeth Scott, who was borrowed from Paramount Pictures' producer Hal Wallis.

[3][4] Scott, an up-and-coming actress being promoted as "The Threat", was often compared to Bogart's wife, Lauren Bacall, as both were former models, and had deep, sultry voices.

[1] Bogart improvised Murdock's extended speech to Scott about men carrying women around in their pockets, taking them out when they were needed to have dinner with or make love to.

[1] The song "Either It's Love or It Isn't", sung by Lizabeth Scott (dubbed by Trudy Stevens) in the film, had words and music by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher.

Film has good suspense and action, and some smart direction and photography ... Bogart absorbs one's interest from the start as a tough, quick-thinking ex-skyjumper.

Film scholar Robert Miklitsch writes in Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir (2011) that, despite the studio's effort to model Scott after Bacall, "she's not without her charms.

Her performance... brings out something Bogart's character that remains occluded in his roles with Bacall, isolating a certain psychic volatility characteristic of the "tough loner," the man who knows too much.

[26] Film scholar Steve Cohan writes in Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (1997) that a primary theme of Dead Reckoning is the failure of the reintegration of war veterans following their homosocial bonding during the extreme circumstances of combat.

[27] He also compares it to Bogart's The Maltese Falcon (1941), writing that it recreates the misogyny of that film through its "rejection of the femme fatale by reimagining it in masculine terms... Dead Reckoning also goes further than that earlier Bogart film in implicating the tough guy's mistrust of women and his corresponding respect for/rivalry with other tough men in a homosexual desire for the phallic virility with which he identifies as the measure of his manhood.

"[22] Writer Emmett Early echoes a similar sentiment, asserting that the film contains a "disturbed erotic undertone of misogyny," citing several pieces of dialogue spoken by Bogart's character that objectify women.

[28] Cohan also notes that the screenplay combines elements of several of Bogart's previous films, "pushing his tough-guy persona to the point of unintentional self-parody.