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Joseph Losey on Lang like Dalí on Millet, a painter's copy. The "Baby Killer" is promptly identified during the credits, he's the shabby figure in the back of the trolley, the silhouette that tenses up at the sight of a little girl. Whole elements from the original are duly reproduced, the compulsive whistling, the sightless balloon merchant at the carnival, the mother growing desperate at the empty table. Then the insinuating hysteria from The Lawless begins permeating the narrative, and by the time the arrested suspects are framed squabbling over a red dress ("What are ya, a Communist?"), the vision is wholly Losey's. The Mayor (Jim Backus) is a vaudevillian after Rorschach results, the police chief (Howard Da Silva) has his hands full with bloodthirsty cops. The underworld kingpin (Martin Gabel) keeps his henchman (Raymond Burr) armed with street informers and his attorney (Luther Adler) hooked on booze and self-loathing, "that's the value of organization." At the center is a psychopath (David Wayne) so choked up with Freudian anguish that he strangulates clay dolls while a portrait of Mother silently judges. (Later, he slouches on a park bench and plays a tin flute while vertiginous cityscapes surge behind him, a bent mental horizon.) Less geometric trap than floating crap game, filtered through pale sunlight rather than engulfing shadows, this is as much a documentary about Los Angeles in the McCarthy years as Lang's film was a snapshot of Weimar Berlin. It builds to a remarkable search of the Bradbury Building's echoing, zigzagging innards, with the culprit dragged from a room filled with mannequins to the impromptu trial in a cavernous garage. "Who's killed our children's hopes?" A society of persecution laid jaggedly bare, from one poet of paranoia to another. With Steve Brodie, Glenn Anders, Norman Lloyd, Walter Burke, John Miljan, and Karen Morley. In black and white.