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Let the dead bury the dead, cp. Fury. "Clean and wholesome," the official line on the corrupt police officer who shoots himself, his widow is Jeanette Nolan and thus Lady Macbeth. The detective sergeant (Glenn Ford) investigates and a venal network emerges, "a city strangled by a gang of thieves." The view from the top gives the luxe-choked mansion of the kingpin (Alexander Scourby) with a jitterbugging soiree in the background, by contrast the hero's suburban lair is last seen bare in the wake of the killing of his wife (Jocelyn Brando). (One moment he's reading a fairytale to their daughter, the next he's dragging the missus out of a bombed-out sedan.) A cop's "hate binge" propels the title's infernal intimations, "it'll burn for a long time." Hard as metal, Fritz Lang's American masterpiece and a summation of virtually all his themes, at once searing and icy. The law is bought and paid for, so is the avenger's gun. The junkyard finds humanity swollen with complacency (Dan Seymour) and hobbling bravely through fear (Edith Evanson). The nightspot is named "like a monastery," accordion music is cut off by the unforgettable scream of the hostess (Carolyn Jones) having a cigarette stubbed out on her wrist just below the frame. "Expensive fun" is the specialty of the pampered party girl (Gloria Grahame), an unlikely ally after the torpedo (Lee Marvin) splashes her with scalding coffee in a cruel dilation from Mann's Raw Deal. ("I can always go through life sideways," she whimpers from behind bandages.) The deceptively diagrammatic form allows for some of Lang's starkest delirium, from military foxholes in living rooms to the molten doll as Kriemhild redivivus. "The lid's off the garbage can, and I did it!" The fall of the crime syndicate is announced in a newspaper headline rising via lap dissolve from a female corpse, the resigned sentinel is back in the system at the close by a poster reading "Give Blood Now." Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly is just round the corner. Cinematography by Charles Lang. With Peter Whitney, Willis Bouchey, Dorothy Green, Howard Wendell, Robert Burton, and Adam Williams. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |