Dick Powell, mining his tough-guy vein opened up by Murder, My Sweet, is the eponymous hero, a cagy casino
manager juggling shady relationships around the roulette, most notably mob boss Thomas Gomez, Gomez's
taunting lush wife Ellen Drew, and two-time loser John Kellogg, his "flatmate". His subzero veneer starts to melt
after meeting equally cynical Evelyn Keyes, whose younger sister just got mysteriously offed around Powell's joint.
After years of peppering script after script with gloved proletarian indignation (They Won't Forget, The Roaring
Twenties), Robert Rossen made his directorial debut with this minor noir piece. Packed with unexplored existential
gambling, fetish objects and implacable detective figures (cigar-chewing Lee J. Cobb as a sweaty bloodhound),
the dramaturgy here is as sub-Dostoevskian as his more famous Body and Soul is faux-Odetsian. Already copping
a self-conscious predilection for closed-off loners testing themselves and redemptive dames infiltrating their milieu,
Rossen clutters up his own stabs at abstraction with half-hearted visuals and chewy dialogue. (Sample: "I dropped
the glass. I dropped it because I'm drunk. I always drop glasses when I'm drunk. I drop a lot of glasses, mister.")
With Nina Foch, Jim Bannon, and Jeff Chandler. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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