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The fateful trajectory is largely composed of gags, the "Man Wanted" sign in the Los Angeles diner is next seen tossed into a pyre. The drifter (John Garfield) notices a lipstick tube rolling on the floor and the camera pans over to its owner's gams, thus Lana Turner like tanned platinum in white shorts and turban, a hamburger burns on a nearby griddle. (Clouzot emulates the effect the following year in Quai des Orfèvres.) "Funny climate around here. The harder the wind blows, the hotter it gets." Standing between them is her husband (Cecil Kellaway), the first attempt to bump him off is literally short-circuited, the next one has the sloshed cuckold's voice echoing in the mountains seconds after the fatal blow. Even with the authorities breathing down their necks ("They guess it right just from habit"), the illicit couple prove to be their own worst enemies. "A blind man without a cane could see you're in a bad way." Despite Tay Garnett's attempts to inject flexibility into studio gloss, noir passion according to MGM remains a laundered, overproduced shadow of James M. Cain's carnal-cosmic bondage. The wickedness of the lovebirds pales beside the unscrupulousness of their counsel (Hume Cronyn), whose "brilliant piece of strategy" leaves the District Attorney (Leon Ames) blindsided in the courtroom and a confession away locked in the safe. Alan Reed as the blackmailing detective invents James Gandolfini, Audrey Totter makes the most of her two minutes in a convertible: "It's a hot day and that's a leather seat. And I've got on a thin skirt." The siren promises "kisses with dreams in them," the fellow can't wait and causes the crash subsequently seen on the way to the gas chamber as some type of divine retribution. (Illumination comes late to the lug who missed the symbolism of the pretty pussycat in the fuse box, "deader than a doornail.") Losey restores the seediness in his splendid revision (The Prowler). With Jeff York, Morris Ankrum, and Byron Foulger. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |