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From Chicago to Los Angeles, a taut ride of Hitchcockisms (not just the claustrophobic setting, but also the tragic switch of brunettes and blondes). The mobster's widow (Marie Windsor) is a dish, "cheap, flashy and strictly poison under the gravy," the MacGuffin is an underworld pay list worth a killing or three. Before the train station, a splendidly staged shootout at the tenement staircase: Pearls from a snapped necklace roll down to the assassin waiting in the shadows, gun blasts followed by a dash through the clotheslines in the courtyard, a change in rhythm as the police detective (Charles McGraw) brushes the cigar ash off his slain partner's lapel. "Some protection they sent me!" Aboard are the mustached muscle (David Clarke) and the gaunt brain (Peter Brocco), each taking a stab at the copper's integrity, plus the young mother (Jacqueline White) caught in the middle. Gangland torpedoes, pesky children, the rotund fellow blocking the corridor, the sundry inconveniences of noir traveling. Richard Fleischer cannily uses cramped space and short time, telegrams read and sent and reflections on glass windows are all part of a tightly-woven mise en scène. (The handheld camera scuttles in and out of compartments, then hinges a close 180° turn on a couple walking outside to give the geography of a busy railroad platform.) An obscure menace tackled viscerally, "a big company with branches all over" confronted in an extended lavatory scuffle that concludes with McGraw's plutonic jaw in battered profile and consequences for From Russia with Love. The whiff of Ulmer's Detour dissipates with a whistle out of the tunnel and into sunlight. "Always meeting in a tight spot, aren't we?" With Queenie Leonard, Don Beddoe, Peter Virgo, Paul Maxey, and Gordon Gebert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |