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A half-dressed housewife screams and pulls down the shutters as she notices the peeping camera, an entire audience of prowlers three years ahead of Rear Window. The failed actress (Evelyn Keyes) restlessly paces the gilded cage of Los Angeles suburbia, the smirking beat flatfoot (Van Heflin) invites himself right in, a former athlete with a barely concealed contempt at having to play public servant. Neither performer ever had direction more inspired than Joseph Losey's: The nervous dance of invasion, desire and innuendo of their early scenes (a married woman's sex compared to gold in a safe, a bobby pin unlocking a cigarette case) nails the James M. Cain twang better than most official Hollywood adaptations. "There are no native Californians," the colonial mausoleum is filled with echoes from the disc-jockey owner—bourgeois respectability reduced to a disembodied, impotent voice, as befits Losey's Brechtian background and Dalton Trumbo's blacklisted subversion. Heflin takes his time stalking-seducing his prey, "accidental" bullets get her husband out of the way, a lie in the courtroom is all it takes to bring the illicit couple back into the community. (A strand of Stroheim is woven into the tapestry as the high-angled camera connects the newlyweds sauntering out of church to the black-shrouded funeral procession across the street.) So it goes in the magnificently ruthless dismantling of the characters' veneers and delusions and self-made traps, all the way to the deserted Nevada mining town where they hide in a scabrous nuclear-family parody. "I'm no good, but I'm no worse than anyone else," cries the antihero at the crossroads of film noir and Cold War paranoia, scrambling to the top of the heap as desert sands crumble under his feet. With John Maxwell, Katherine Warren, Emerson Treacy, Madge Blake, Wheaton Chambers, and Robert Osterloh. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |