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The eponymous abyss sprawls horizontally rather than vertically as a nocturnal scan of the protagonist bottoming out, wandering the streets in the wake of adultery and murder. "How does it feel to be a decent, respectable married man?" Plush postwar Los Angeles, the Boy Most Likely to Succeed is now an insurance wonk (Dick Powell) at the breakfast table, staring bitterly at fried eggs, schedules, domestic routines. Sailing far away is the dream, he makes do with a fling with the fashion model (Lizabeth Scott) with an embezzling beau (Byron Barr) in the clink. "A case of temporary insanity" cannot be dodged, the other players are the private-eye stalker (Raymond Burr) and the pert wife who turns to stone (Jane Wyatt). The Lang nightmare (The Woman in the Window) provides the elements of composition, though André De Toth's grip is not so much deterministic as humanistic—rope-tight but wounded, with each pawn in the grid allowed trenchant space to deepen the fallout of their actions. No spidery vamp, Scott's luckless babe is bright and vulnerable, sending the straying drone back to suburbia once she learns of his family. (Her fate is the most tragic in the tale, last seen as a turned-away figure in black burned into the memory of the man responsible for her fall.) The somber De Toth geometry for "a wheel within a wheel within a wheel" of middle-class contentment, meshed prison diagonals for mirror reflections disguised as opposite poles. Powell scolds his son for the nightmare of comic books, yet there he is quaking with gun in the shadowy pit of his own living room. "The trick is, take only good pictures..." Lies crack open the married couple's status quo and then lies force it back together, the future they drive off into is the Fifties of Sirk and Ray. With John Litel, Jimmy Hunt, and Ann Doran. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |