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John Alton's nocturnal abstractions are staggering and, under Joseph H. Lewis' concentrated direction, quite distinct from his architectural chiaroscuro for Anthony Mann. (Surfaces are more liquid, as befits an arena of shifting alliances and torments and kinks.) The heroine (Jean Wallace) is a sliver of wounded light in the void, doleful and neurasthenic like the barmaid in Bresson's Mouchette. Her captor and lover is an underworld lord (Richard Conte) who understands the value of personality and the strength of hatred, and whose Mediterranean sensuality strokes her masochistic zones—he hungrily kisses her neck and slowly disappears below the frame, the disgusted ecstasy on her gulping visage fills the screen. "What is it about a hoodlum that appeals to certain women?" The law is merely a veneer for pathological loathing and envy, the crusade of the police lieutenant (Cornel Wilde) against the kingpin ("like fighting a swamp with a teaspoon") traps an anguished woman between obsessed doppelgängers. To make his point, Conte borrows the hearing aid of his associate (Brian Donlevy) and metes out punishment for the cop's eardrums. (The other half of the gag comes later, when Lewis drops the sound at the flash of machine-gun fire.) "I'm trying to run an impersonal business. Killing is very personal." Other denizens of the maze include the detective's burlesque-house squeeze (Helene Stanton), the gangster's wife (Helen Walker) "buried alive" in the sanitarium for a note of Brontë, and the henchman-witness (Ted de Corsia) who cooks pasta while waiting for death. Assassins (Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman) sleep in twin beds and chat about salamis and closets, the tale's most moving romance. Weary of being an illuminating trophy, Wallace seizes the searchlight at last, Lewis ribs Casablanca for the finale and goes his own perverse way. With Robert Middleton, John Hoyt, Jay Adler, and Roy Gordon. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |