|
Brooding, raging in the noir city, "that jungle outside of my front door." The opening credits activate the sense of bebop abstraction, infra-red stock lends a radioactive tinge to location filming. The Black entertainer (Harry Belafonte) wails at the nightclub, loses at the racetrack, lets resentment get between him and the missus (Kim Hamilton). The white ex-con (Robert Ryan) is bitterly carried by the waitress he's married (Shelley Winters), slugging the wind out of a young Army showoff is one of the few pleasures he gets out of life. The disgraced retired cop (Ed Begley) brings the two together for a caper, a bank so unprotected "you could take it with a water pistol." The operation is solid, a curving pan gives way to a zoom as the camera peers at the target through Venetian blinds, the wrench in the gears turns out to be good ol' bigotry. "Don't beat out that Civil War jazz here!" Some of Robert Wise's finest work at the service of the bleakness of Abraham Polonsky's screenplay, geometric urban patterns jangled by pockets of vivid sordidness. Belafonte takes his daughter to the fair while followed by a creditor's henchmen, he agrees to the robbery in a phone booth as carousers pass by and pop the kid's balloon. Ryan finds himself alone with the downstairs neighbor (Gloria Grahame) in an insinuating tour de force vibrating off the slattern's kinky curiosity about the brute's murderous past. "You want me to make your flesh creep?" Crisscrossing desperate lives sharply etched as the would-be crooks wait for dusk and the lights are turned on main street, the principal influences are on Melville and Lumet. The apocalyptic coda finds not reconciliation but the charred remains of hatred. "A man always dreams of what he wants, or what he's afraid of." Cinematography by Joseph C. Brun. With Will Kuluva, Mae Barnes, Richard Bright, Carmen De Lavallade, Lew Gallo, Wayne Rogers, and Zohra Lampert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |