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The opening hold-up—the camera's backseat view of the drive, the clobbering of the gas-station clerk, the point-blank shooting of a motorcycle cop—is scored to half-heard Gershwin and cut with magnificent abruptness. The wounded fugitive (Nedrick Young) expires in the living room of his former San Quentin cellmate (Gene Nelson), soon his cohorts (Ted De Corsia and Charles Bronson) are at the front door "for old times' sake." The underworld is slashed by shadows, the police station is a bare cosmos where voices echo in cavernous offices and the homicide detective (Sterling Hayden) looms over stoolies. "Once you've done a bit, nobody leaves you alone," snarls the ex-con caught in the middle. "Somebody's always on your back." It takes an outsider's eye to appreciate the strangeness of Los Angeles at night, in the middle of the roundup of suspects André De Toth takes note of a little Salvation Army band playing "Bringing in the Sheaves." The heft of time spent behind bars is not easily forgotten by the characters, still "the hazards of life on the outside" are even more treacherous. (The fragility of hope is beautifully stated in a close-up of intertwined hands, one reaching for a ringing telephone while the other seizes it by the wrist.) An unerring feel for desolate highways, shabby apartments, and seamy visages: The wobbly sawbones (Jay Novello) is revealed as a disgraced doctor and mourned by caged dogs, elsewhere the twitchy goon (Timothy Carey) leers at the thought of the protagonist's wife (Phyllis Kirk) bathing behind a closed door. "Charred and rare" describes the De Toth outlook, the detective's hardboiled compassion earns him a single cigarette puff before a return to his toothpick diet. "Mercy, that's what they call it." With James Bell, Dub Taylor, Gayle Kellogg, Mack Chandler, and Hank Worden. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |