Railroaded!

The salon is but one speck in a nocturnal urban sprawl, the hairdresser (Jane Randolph) lets thieves in through the back door and her coworker (Peggy Converse) shrieks as a shotgun looms toward her. ("Your House of Beauty," reads the glass window, seen reversed and shattered by gun blasts.) The accomplice's jaw is shot off, the mastermind (John Ireland) proceeds with frame-ups and intimidation, "he's the kind they build prisons for." A mechanic (Ed Kelly) takes the blame, his sister (Sheila Ryan) shuttles between bandit and police investigator (Hugh Beaumont). "You know, there are only two kinds of animals that make war on their own kind: Rats and men. And men are supposed to be able to think." Continuous compression on shoestring shadows, a show of Anthony Mann's technical prowess from start to finish. The culprit is hailed as "an artist" by the nightclub honcho, who likes to quote misogynistic witticisms to his bored girlfriend. "That's from Oscar Wilde." "Give it back to him." (For his part, the criminal observes a tussle between two women with revolver erect in hand.) The handkerchief that masks a hoodlum becomes a mass of bandages as he agonizes at the hospital with half his face gone, a terse description of ankles bound by wire is enough to register the grim fate of a witness. "Fastidious, huh?" The nervous moll suddenly no longer alone in her flat, the sleepy sot springing to alert life with a bogus alibi, the antiseptic ballistics laboratory invaded by perfumed bullets—a punchy run-through for T-Men and Raw Deal. The final shootout is properly disfigured by Kubrick in Killer's Kiss. With Charles D. Brown, Clancy Cooper, Keefe Brasselle, Hermine Sterler, and Roy Gordon. In black and white.