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A second chance for the They Live by Night couple in an incidental companion piece, cf. Vertigo and Bell Book and Candle. Aerial views of New York City yield to low angles of looming architecture, the police captain (Paul Kelly) ponders the masses: "Which of these people will be the victims? Which will be the killers?" A case study, the postman (Farley Granger) with a pregnant wife (Cathy O'Donnell), "no hero, no criminal, just human." Surrounded by materialistic temptation, he succumbs and finds himself with a fortune belonging to an extortion ring. (The operation's ruthlessness is stated with a shock-shot of the corpse of the blonde used as bait face down amidst pier flotsam.) Guilt, terror, bad decisions sized up by a muggy minion: "This guy don't know the right turn." MGM's patronizing doctrine of little people and benevolent coppers, strikingly complicated by Anthony Mann's panoply of shadowy dread. The chummy barkeep absconds with the money, his nephew squeals on him for the price of a banana split, a knocked-over lampshade frames the ransacked murder scene. The maternity ward the protagonist breaks into is a tenebrous zone, the cathedral bells near the close toll from a silhouetted Gothic tower. (On the margins is a peek at a struggling tavern: "We're putting television in next week!") Sharp location filming, a car chase to meld the kinetic and the moral, Jean Hagen's vivid sketch of a sodden nightclub songbird involved with the killer. "He hit me once when I recited Robert Burns... no manners." It might be a lost segment from Antonioni's I Vinti, hope is a fragile image shrinking from the back of a speeding ambulance. With James Craig, Paul Harvey, Edmon Ryan, Charles McGraw, Edwin Max, Adele Jergens, Harry Bellaver, and Whit Bissell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |