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A manhunt to give a documentary view of Los Angeles, a film noir specialty (vide Sekely's Hollow Triumph and De Toth's Pitfall the same year). A true detective-department story, "the most difficult homicide case in its existence," a matter of persistence and technology. The culprit (Richard Basehart) is "cunning, resourceful and deadly," the cop he shoots point-blank dies remarking how he "looked like such a nice kid." Police sergeant (Scott Brady) and captain (Roy Roberts) on his trail, the killer leaves no trace and slips handily through gutter openings. (The meticulous construction has a nerve-center of deadpan bulldogs plus a netherworld of caves underneath the asphalt.) The rounding up of suspects, the sketch artist's craft (feature by feature, the suspect's face emerges on a blank screen before an audience of nervous victims), in scrupulous detail "for police work is not all glamour and excitement and glory." Alfred L. Werker's sangfroid handling is just what's called for in this bedrock of Dragnet Bressonisms, and sure enough there's Jack Webb at the laboratory with nitroglycerin under the microscope. Against his anonymity lies the expressionism of uncredited co-director Anthony Mann: cavernous offices suffused with John Alton's pools of cold light, Basehart in his lair surrounded by gadgets and later tending an agonizing bullet wound, a scene noted by Melville in Le Samouraï. Former radio operator and war vet, "as unknown as if he had lived in the 16th-century," flushed out of his bungalow and into subterranean tunnels—not Hugo's "conscience of the city" but a nightmare of pipes and smoke, with the murderous rodent surrounded by flashlights for the benefit of Reed's The Third Man. With Whit Bissell, James Cardwell, Dorothy Adams, and Kenneth Tobey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |