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The oneiric element kicks off with an aerial view of Los Angeles at night that descends to a nightclub parking lot, and there's Yvonne De Carlo in furs pleading at the camera. The patsy (Burt Lancaster) is her ex-husband, the tale is an anxious remembrance at the wheel of an armored truck. "Cheap little no good tramp!" "Stick around. You make it all sound so nice and sad." The clandestine couple is discovered by her current fellow, an underworld heavy (Dan Duryea) who crashes their love nest (they're alerted to his presence by the sound of henchmen helping themselves to the beer in their fridge) and must be convinced that the affair is actually part of a daring robbery plan. The driver turned inside man has a cumbersome analogy for the situation: "A man eats an apple..." The distillate of noir doom, pure and acrid, laid out by Robert Siodmak in dense deep-focus arrangements giving a pointed portrait of the city. (The hoods planning the heist in a shadowy room divide the screen into multiple visual planes, with a Bunker Hill trolley glimpsed through a window in the distant background.) The caper proceeds from Lang's You Only Live Once, masks and bullets in a burst of smoke prefaced with a panning overhead shot of the truck in motion, the aftermath is a woozy POV at the hospital facing the detective lieutenant (Stephen McNally) and a suspicious visitor (Robert Osterloh). "It was in the cards, or it was fate or a jinx or whatever you wanna call it," the end of the line is a coastal cabin where Duryea materializes out of the darkness like nothing so much as Nosferatu himself. Soderbergh's saturnine recomposition (The Underneath) rehearses the cubism of The Limey. Cinematography by Franz Planer. With Esy Morales, Tom Pedi, Percy Helton, Alan Napier, Griff Barnett, Meg Randall, Richard Long, Joan Miller, Edna Holland, John Doucette, Marc Krah, James O'Rear, Gene Evans, and Tony Curtis. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |