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"There seems to be a feeling of mistrust in the air." "I wonder why." The perfect patsy (John Hodiak), memory wiped clean by a grenade, eyes nervously darting under bandages at the Navy hospital. (The subjective opening has a little tilt of the camera as the nurse adjusts the protagonist's bed.) Off to Los Angeles with only a name on a letter to go on, the very mention of it nearly gets him pounded at the night spot so he hides in the dressing room with the chanteuse (Nancy Guild). "You know, I can't make up my mind whether this is a pitch or you're some kind of nut." There's hidden loot and a murderer who might be himself, just another G.I. struggling to reenter society. The club owner (Richard Conte) tags along skeptically, the police lieutenant (Lloyd Nolan) drops by affably. "Big postwar boom in homicide." Joseph L. Mankiewicz up noir alley, a labyrinthine vortex concurrent with The Big Sleep. Busy Chinatown restaurant, baleful Turkish bath, a witness addled and stabbed at the end of the sanitarium corridor. The Germanic element comes down to a sham spiritualist with a crystal ball (Fritz Kortner), even the tart moll (Margo Woode) sees through the façade: "Stop talking like Bela Lugosi!" An aria of loneliness by Josephine Hutchinson, a piano ditty ("In the Middle of Nowhere"), a vexed Sheldon Leonard in an undershirt. Pervasive murkiness, then illumination under the boardwalk at night—an abrupt revelation, a matchstick flare, gun blasts. The nightmare writes itself off with a wink, "seems that the movies are right." Through Dmytryk's Mirage and Mann's Mister Buddwing it passes, to go into Nolan's Memento. With Houseley Stevenson, Harry Morgan, Lou Nova, Whit Bissell, and Jeff Corey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |