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No other kind, says Fritz Lang of the title, "love that makes people hurt each other" is his forte. The grid is at once laid out, train tracks like hardened arteries for destiny's streamlined engine. The hothead (Broderick Crawford) loses his job as stationmaster over an argument, his wife (Gloria Grahame) gets it back for him and is smacked for her trouble, the investor stabbed in a jealous rage reinforces their strained marital bonds. (Railroad suits groan at the scandal: "If a guy has to get himself murdered, why don't he pick one of the airlines?") The witness is the locomotive engineer (Glenn Ford), looking for order after a stint in Korea but open to clandestine sex with the battered siren he saw at the scene of the crime. An icy grip for lurid frenzies, a companion piece to both The Big Heat and, as another salutary junction of Lang and Renoir, to Scarlet Street. Middle-America Zola, a white fence around a seedy bungalow never far from the roar of machines. "Now, when it's quiet, I get nervous." The blackmailed woman seeks an escape, the ex-soldier acquainted with killing would seem to make a good accomplice, "that's what they give you medals for." Seeing the lumbering slob lost in despairing thought, he instead draws a line between combat and homicide and opts for the landlord's virginal daughter (Kathleen Case). Grahame takes over as the story's tragic nucleus, complicating the femme fatale with vivid desperation, awaiting oblivion at the close while the sanctimonious hero gazes ahead at an antiseptic future. A floozy's comic relief merely accentuates the jaundiced view: "Much better to have good looks than brains, because most of the men I know can see much better than they can think." Cinematography by Burnett Guffey. With Edgar Buchanan, Peggy Maley, Diane DeLaire, Grandon Rhodes, and Dan Seymour. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |