|
It leaps from police station to baseball stadium to burlesque house in the first five minutes, the beginning of a detailed Los Angeles picture. (Later there are studies of derricks on the outskirts and shadowy wharfs with distant boat whistles.) Concurrent with The Asphalt Jungle, a perennial theme: "What's his trouble?" "Money. What's yours?" "Lack of it." The holdup is swiftly sketched, smoke from a jalopy supplies the cover for hoods in coveralls with gas masks, cf. Nosseck's Dillinger. The mastermind (William Talman) is fastidious, no labels and no notes are left behind, "no loose ends, baby." He's also seeing the stripper wife (Adele Jergens) of his luckless associate (Douglas Fowley), who agonizes from a bullet in the belly after the robbery. The other gang members (Steve Brodie and Gene Evans) are in over their heads, the police lieutenant on their trail (Charles McGraw) wants revenge for his slain partner. The rookie detective (Don McGuire) surveys the situation with a chuckle, "the naked and the dead." Documentary details accumulated for a hallucinatory effect, a Richard Fleischer forte from Follow Me Quietly to The Boston Strangler. A smear of lipstick, tire tracks on the waterfront, scribbles on a matchbox, assorted clues leading to the methodical criminal with a bugged moll. Cops and robbers as parallel lanes, to go undercover from one to the other is a most perilous art. "What do we got to lose?" "Nothing. Only me." Fluttering bills and mangled body on the airport runway go into Kubrick (The Killing) and Gries (Breakout), just "a fast sixty-buck funeral" at the end of the line. With Don Haggerty, James Flavin, Anne Nagel, Richard Irving and Anne O'Neal. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |