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The fugitive and the moll and "Miss Law and Order." This is where John Alton's spatial studies in T-Men come into play, the convict (Dennis O'Keefe) and his lawyer's aide (Marsha Hunt) sit across from each other in a visiting room divided by wide-angle diagonals, just the cavernous yet suffocating deep-focus Anthony Mann needs. The criminal once earned a medal for heroism, what happened? "He pawned the medal because he was hungry," he breaks out of jail and drags the girl along with the police close behind. The camera tilts down to a light post in Corkscrew Alley and then pans left to a penthouse engulfed by San Francisco mist, the racketeer (Raymond Burr) who railroaded the protagonist seethes while his torpedo (John Ireland) plays with a collapsing house of cards. At the center is Claire Trevor's tenderly hardboiled rendition of an underworld gal Friday running out of time, "waiting, waiting, always waiting" while the lug she loves falls instead for the counselor they've taken hostage. Quai des Brumes is the model, but with fatalistic poetry ringed with the threat of violence: A bowl of flaming brandy is hurled at the lenses to register the fate of a luckless party girl, deer antlers become an impaling weapon during a scuffle at a taxidermist's shop. Men brawl amidst flames in this sinewy noir, though the real story rests in Trevor's doleful inner struggle. Shivering behind a veil, her profile set against the heavy ticking of a clock, she listens to her beloved babbling about new beginnings while her rival is being tortured somewhere—a tangle of desire and guilt pointing the way to the redemptive inferno. In Mann's city, the "breath of fresh air" the antiheroes long for is really their last. With Curt Conway, Chili Williams, Richard Fraser, and Whit Bissell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |