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The iceberg dame and the psychotic lout, "soul mates, huh?" The two trade glances at a Reno craps table, the divorcée (Claire Trevor) and the drifter (Lawrence Tierney), that same night she walks into a murder scene of his doing. The strapping oak is a lurid fascination for the socialite with no use for turnips, in San Francisco they get even closer after he marries her foster sister, a newspaper heiress (Audrey Long). Floating in the sidelines are the thug's weaselly comrade (Elisha Cook Jr.) and the blowsy landlady out for justice (Esther Howard), the corrupt private eye (Walter Slezak) is an amused observer. "Ain't she cold-blooded, though?" "I wouldn't say so. I'd say she was being practical." The pallid swells and vivid scroungers of film noir, a deft welter of characters trailing and circling each other while at the center the protagonists remain locked in a lowdown dance of heat. "A moral deterioration of moral fiber" gladly shifts Robert Wise from tasteful craftsman to chronicler of hard-edged perversities: A lapdog whimpering at corpses in a darkened kitchen, the thug supine in bed as the camera inches toward his face lost in malevolent thought, a matron's terror at a description of what a blade can do to flesh. Mansions and boarding houses for the upstairs-downstairs element, between them a nightmarish deserted shore at around midnight. (Wind and smoke and sand dunes comprise the lunar landscape, switchblades and needles are the tools at hand.) "Has it occurred to you? Neither of us looks like a scoundrel, do we?" Slezak's detective has the shrugging last word after bullets curtail the Liebestod, the unexpected rejoinder is from Buñuel in El Bruto. With Phillip Terry, Isabel Jewell, Kathryn Card, and Martha Hyer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |