Reviews

If you are a film noir fan, you'll want to see this for yourself no matter what anybody says. I personally was not that impressed.

First, let me say that Dan Duryea (Martin) is excellent as a decent fellow whose weakness of drinking when he can't face a problem has serious consequences. June Vincent (Catherine) is lovely and sings well. Peter Lorre (Marko) is, well, the reason I rented this DVD. He's a treat (as always) despite his small part (more later after a "spoiler" alert).

Disappointments: Most of the story revolves around a red herring. After the final twist, subsequent scenes just drag out the inevitable. The characters do some dumb things because they need to for the plot to work. Catherine doesn't start her investigating until *after* her husband is convicted (to add that "time crunch" element). Marko holds on to an incriminating letter that any normal person would have destroyed (because the plot needs him to). Although the rest of the actions the characters take are not unbelievable, the implications are not as fully explored as they could/should be--of the premise that Catherine is possibly risking her life to prove innocent of murder a husband who is guilty of cheating on her; of why Martin carries a torch for such a despicable woman as Mavis; of the revelation of who is innocent and who might be owed an apology; of the main twist and what being guilty and the ultimate consequences mean to the murderer. The 81 minute length of this movie may be more to blame than the scriptwriter and director, but a hint that the above situations cause internal approach-avoidance conflicts would have truly raised this film above a "B" movie to a noir classic (Duryea gets the closest to achieving this--but the intermittent drinking bouts the script gives him provide him the opportunity).

The scenes introducing Mavis at the beginning are shot in an effective "noirish" manner, but I found most of the direction to be so-so: close-up inserts (of letters and other clues) are at incorrect angles; the camera pans during a nightclub scene and doesn't end up on anything interesting or pertinent to the plot; the sequence where Catherine is about to be caught snooping is not played out to full suspense; the last of Martin's alcoholic binge montages include a couple of pretty silly-looking shots.

***SPOILER ALERT!!!****************************************************** For those of you who've already seen this movie... I can't believe one reviewer here said Peter Lorre is playing a villain. Come on, now! He's playing a red herring. The only "villainous" thing Marko does is direct Lucky to twist Catherine's arm until she tells where she hid the items she was trying to steal from him. Since he didn't know she was looking for clues to clear her husband and believed she was looking for material to blackmail him (which he'd inexplicably kept!) and his motive is to hide the fact that he is an ex-convict in order to save his married daughter from embarrassment, well, his actions are not much more villainous than Catherine's pretending to be attracted to him in order to get close to his safe and rob him. After the viewer learns he is *not* the murderer, the magic of rewind can show you that, actually, Marko treats Catherine pretty decently throughout the movie and he's probably sincere when he tells her he knew who she was all along but had appreciated (more than other people, because he's an ex-con) that she was trying to make a new start. It's just that soft, "bedroom" voice of Lorre's that allows whatever he says to be interpreted as "menacing," which makes this red herring work. *I*, at least, was taken in. I thought the movie was building toward a confrontation where Marko would discover Catherine was using him and would attempt to kill her with the cry that that was why he had killed Mavis. When this didn't turn out to be the case, I thought Catherine would feel bad about her misconceptions and apologize to Marko as she'd apologized to Martin (in which case her suspicions were *not* misconceptions). She didn't.