This film has great atmosphere and starts out with promise, but it bogs down pretty quickly. For one, Edmund O'Brien is playing a man who has been a police detective for 16 years yet he kills a guy in cold blood in an alley with apparently two apartment complexes full of windows looking down on what he is doing. Also, the 25K that the detective steals from the man he kills was slated to go to a very violent gangster who has an accurate account of the comings and goings of the dead man. O'Brien owns up to the shooting itself but tells internal affairs that his gun misfired on a fleeing perp, so now the gangster knows exactly who to point the finger at. Plus the detective is known as a marksman and crack shot. All in all, Leslie Nielson's Frank Drebbin couldn't have done a worse job.
The detective is willing to kill to get this 25K so he can buy a rather modest tract house and live the middle class dream with his barroom cigarette-girl girlfriend as his wife. He just wants to live like a normal guy and get out of the "muck" of the criminal element even though his act has turned him into that criminal element.
The rest of the film is spent trying to show how the detective went bad, and the conflicted feelings of the man doing the internal police investigation on the shooting. The investigator happens to be someone who, as a kid, O'Brien's character rescued from a life of crime.
It's a pretty good character study and crime drama with some interesting twists and turns, but it's definitely not a ground-breaking noir.
The detective is willing to kill to get this 25K so he can buy a rather modest tract house and live the middle class dream with his barroom cigarette-girl girlfriend as his wife. He just wants to live like a normal guy and get out of the "muck" of the criminal element even though his act has turned him into that criminal element.
The rest of the film is spent trying to show how the detective went bad, and the conflicted feelings of the man doing the internal police investigation on the shooting. The investigator happens to be someone who, as a kid, O'Brien's character rescued from a life of crime.
It's a pretty good character study and crime drama with some interesting twists and turns, but it's definitely not a ground-breaking noir.