Richard Widmark and Harry Guardino play detectives on the trail of a murderer. Simultaneously, Henry Fonda is the commissioner who finds something dirty on Chief Inspector James Whitmore, who we perhaps recognise from The Shawshank Redemption and earlier, The Asphalt Jungle (also Them and much on TV).
Peter Bogdanovich thought the "fatal shoot-out at the end is among the most brilliantly shot and cut pieces of action ever made"... which, to be brutally honest, is one of the few things he's written that I'm not sure I'd agree with. What about the end of Bonnie and Clyde, for example?
I'd anticipated that happily married Guardino would be killed, but got that totally wrong.
Unfortunately the music is terrible - makes it sound like a sixties TV drama.
Siegel and the producer did not get on and the latter made stupid changes. Siegel had loved the book (by Richard Dougherty) which was adapted by Howard Rodman, then reworked by Abe Polosnksy and Siegel himself.
The cars look like they're in a widescreen process all of their own.
With Inger Stevens, Susan Clark, Michael Dunn, Don Stroud (impressively Methody).
I doesn't look like a Russell Metty picture, perhaps because it's not studios set. Universal.
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