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Phil Karlson has a bravura opening to set up the pugilist's nightmare: On the ropes under infernal lights, a bout in slow-mo revealed as a replay on a TV screen watched by the loser (John Payne), a taciturn mug but for the twitch in his eye. He's now a cabbie and married to the straying shopgirl (Peggie Castle), his gift of a box of chocolates goes unwrapped after he catches her with the oily thief (Brad Dexter). "There are worse things than murder. You can kill somebody an inch at a time." The pet shop is a front for the fence racket, the diamond deal gone awry leaves a corpse in the backseat of the antihero's taxi. Through it all floats the Broadway hopeful (Evelyn Keyes) whose confession in an empty theater turns out to be an audition, an irruption of Cukor amid noir louts, "a bit of an experiment." (Her other keen performance is as a provocative barfly at a dockside dive in a sendup of The Asphalt Jungle.) "Roll with those punches till your head clears," the athlete's vindication over the course of one long, dark night. Slugging physicality, the Karlson forte—blows to the neck, the smashed nose and the blood-speckled suit, the rattled peeper that blurs the showdown. Lost opportunities at the gym, the nerve center of a dispatch office, the threat of sordid violence coursing through every set. Bleeding from a bullet wound but still in dogged pursuit, the moment of truth on a staircase by the edge of the ocean. "That's the way you gotta do it, champ. Break it gently." Much of it goes into On the Waterfront the following year. With Frank Faylen, Jay Adler, Jack Lambert, Glenn Langan, Eddy Waller, and Ian Wolfe. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |