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"Institutions of mercy" are thanked in the preface, surely cinema first and foremost. The young woman (Sally Forrest) enters in a daze, unconsciously a kidnapper after helping herself to a baby in a pram, in the holding cell she recalls it all. Small-town waitress and stifled suburban daughter, quite aware of the moody charms of the traveling piano player (Leo Penn). (Their tryst is stated with a dissolve from a cigarette floating down a stream to a ticking nightstand clock.) He's got one principle, "never get involved," she finds out only after hopping a Greyhound to follow him to Capital City. The other guy (Keefe Brasselle) is a limping war vet running a gas station, whose ideal "delicatessen date" concludes with him proudly displaying his vast electric train set. Pregnancy, flight, despair. "Got to keep going until I find some place where I belong," everybody's story. Replacing the credited director, Ida Lupino discovers the template for her impassioned studies of vulnerability and alienation, a dash of neorealismo in a corner of Los Angeles. An expressionistic carousel ahead of Strangers on a Train, a world of buses and boarding houses. Fear and solidarity at the home for unwed mothers, where an unbroken take isolates two uneasy patients in a pool of light against the void. (The subjective sequence of the heroine on a gurney gliding down the corridor to the delivery room proceeds from Borzage's A Farewell to Arms, with consequences for Peckinpah's Cross of Iron.) "You can certainly get a rotten deal, can't you." Hope lies at the end of the arduous chase. One New Wave recognizes another, cf. Delaney's A Taste of Honey. With Dorothy Adams, Wheaton Chambers, Rita Lupino, Audrey Farr, Carole Donne, Ruth Clifford, and Lawrence Dobkin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |