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Noir crime and silent-film melodrama, an anguished symphony in two movements. Rain-slick asphalt merging with the nocturnal sky, desolate flats and saloons and back alleys, Scorsese's feverish city decades in advance. Eleven years on the force for the clenched cop (Robert Ryan), "kind of a lonely life." His partners have loved ones to come home to, his own encounters are with the "crooks, murderers, winos, stoolies, dames" who bring out his savagery: "Why do you make me do it," he asks before pummeling a twitchy suspect, suspended between snarl and sob. Violence gets him banished upstate, where a murder investigation leads to grace personified, the sightless woman (Ida Lupino) surrounded by endless snow. "In my job, it gets so you don't trust anyone." "I have to trust everyone." An angular modulation from harsh to lyrical and back, the culmination of Nicholas Ray's Borzagean side. The blanched expanses of the wintry countryside promise purification yet prove to be as much of a void as the claustrophobic urban maze—POV tracking shots through windshields guide the protagonist in the city, on the frozen road after a spill he's an out-of-focus camera turned on its side. Ryan away from his territory is surrounded by doppelgängers, he's the boy (Summer Williams) whose artistic hand has picked up a switchblade and he's the victim's father (Ward Bond) wielding a vengeful shotgun. The demure waif first materializes like a shadow of the frowzy moll back home (Cleo Moore), a petrified tree branch stands in the middle of her cabin as if sprouting from the floorboards. (Lupino runs her fingers over a mirror and pauses to fix a lock of hair before her anxious reflection, ten seconds or so worthy of Buñuel.) Illumination for the blind and serenity for the beast in Ray's most transcendent work, a composition of disconcerting purity. Cinematography by George E. Diskant. With Charles Kemper, Anthony Ross, Ed Begley, Ian Wolfe, Frank Ferguson, Gus Schilling, and Olive Carey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |