A rare film noir - though of course it features in Eddie Muller's trove of that genre 'Dark City' - 'One of the most emotionally charged and bleakest of all noirs'. Film is unjustly forgotten and packs a punch in lynch mob finale. ("There are more films in this heaven and earth...")
Properly doomed, down on his luck anti-hero Frank Lovejoy (one of the ex-service / post-war depression / crime scenarios which it seems noir was capable of talking about) unluckily falls in with violent criminal Lloyd Bridges (who twirls things well) - a really nasty murder of a kidnap victim results and as Lovejoy falls apart with booze he accidentally confesses to Adele Jergens.
Meanwhile newspaperman Richard Carlson is getting a lesson in ethics from Renzo Cesana and Kathleen Ryan is left at home looking after the brat - I mean son.
Can't have been that low budget, with final mob scenes, really rather nicely put together throughout (OK too much camera tilt in nightclub scene, but you have to forgive these youngsters - actually he was 36 - their youthful excesses) and nicely shot by someone called Guy Roe (great shots from inside back of car oddly resemble similar material in same year's Gun Crazy). Jo Pagano adapted his own novel. Music Hugo Friedhofer.
Good print onto DVDR available from www.pressplayhouse.net. Try and find it elsewhere.
Once again this is an example of a film that enraged the HUAC for being 'un-American', causing Endfield (like Losey) to relocate to England, where his most famous film became Zulu.
Loved the waitress who gives the order for a steak sandwich as 'cow on a slab' and also has another such gem in her repertoire (which now I can't remember).
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