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Samuel Fuller's characters let their impulses erupt like geysers while Douglas Sirk's live and die by their fancy straitjackets, the opening sequence (the camera rises out of the gutter to follow a sharp-faced brunette around Hollywood Boulevard) at once gives the captivating tension between the grunge of the screenplay and the sheen of the direction. About to meet her parole officer (Cornel Wilde), the newly released jailbird (Patricia Knight) dons white dress and heels, halo hat and peroxided tresses, a bit of ersatz purification to go with her ersatz poise. A few scenes later and she's picked up in a bookie raid, along with the oily underworld dandy she did time for (John Baragrey). What makes a lawbreaker? "It's hereditary... It's environment... It's a joke!" Turns out it's romantic ardor, something much more volatile: "Put that in your test tube, Doc, and what do you see?" The mannequin and the flatfoot have a go as Borzagean sweethearts on the lam, though the presiding feeling is one of prisons everywhere—not just the jail cell waiting for the heroine to make a false move, but also the hero's office (the half-circular window behind his desk is a virtual web of glass and metal) and even his family home. (With its Old World arches, staircases, and blind-yet-all-seeing mamas, the place is not so much a domestic sanctuary as it is a template for Sirk's later bourgeois mausoleums.) Emerson states the theme (Give All to Love), the protagonist states the style ("corrosion"). The maligned ending is consistent with the vehement contradictions of Fuller's bruisers, "something to do with human nature." They Live by Night is concurrent, Written on the Wind's oil pumps already line the horizon. With Esther Minciotti, Howard St. John, Russell Collins, and Charles Bates. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |