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The title is the film noir condition, the nightmare is of the ex-GI pushed back into war, as it were. A phone call is all it takes to collapse the stability of the returning soldier (Steve Brodie) and his pregnant wife (Audrey Long), the quick job for a gang of thieves leads to a warehouse shootout later reworked in Fargo's The Enforcer. The captured hood has an older brother (Raymond Burr), whose vengeful visage is strikingly distorted by swinging shadows from an overhead lamp while the hero takes a beating. (A clenched fist blots out the screen, a car ride puts pistol to stomach: "All right, wise guy, drive where I tell you or you'll get a sudden bellyache.") A cozy rural community awaits at the end of the fugitive couple's road, though Anthony Mann is more galvanized by the unsavory mugs along the way: The barrel-chested cheat (Cy Kendall) lording over his used-car dominion, the amoral snoop (Douglas Fowley) squeezing the villain for money, demonic papier-mâché masks peeping from the back of a truck on the darkened highway. The police lieutenant (Jason Robards Sr.) is in no rush to protect the anguished patsy ("When I hook those sharks, I want them all together"), the fellow expectant father in the waiting room (Eddie Parks) turns out to be a life insurance salesman making a pitch, "I never saw a better risk than you!" A ticking clock in a shabby apartment sets the stage for the memorably bizarre climax, a double execution at midnight resolved with a hail of bullets and an Escher angle on the tenement staircase. De Toth's recomposition in Crime Wave removes the last vestiges of sentimentality. With William Challee, Lee Frederick, Freddie Steele, Paul E. Burns, Ilka Grüning, and Larry Nunn. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |