The black cloud over big city police detective Robert Ryan’s head all but wafts off the screen, into your room and rains all over your ceramic elephant collection. He’s one of cinema’s most memorable haunted cops.
The job is getting to him. Every lowlife he has to deal with burns another hole in his soul. Every mild jab about the police that he overhears from the citizenry stings. He won’t talk to anyone about his problems, but he will vent his frustrations via old-fashioned police brutality. It’s joyless for him, though. In Ryan’s great performance, he’s not merely a brutal asshole. He’s a person in crisis, one of God’s Lonely Men. When he beats up a suspect within an inch of their life, he’s also beating up himself. He plays with fire, half-hoping to get burned (losing his job, if not something even worse) because at least that’s something different.
Instead of firing him though, the harried police captain sends him out of town on a case upstate where the woods are thick, the snow falls in blankets and the local yokels want vigilante justice after the murder of a young girl. When he partners up with the dead girl’s shotgun-wielding father (a reliable Ward Bond), it’s the first time that Ryan is the sane one in the room. That plus the influence of Ida Lupino, as an endlessly compassionate blind woman who lives even deeper in the sticks, gets Ryan to do the self-reflection that he could never manage among urban noise and neon.
Directed by the great Nicholas Ray, this is noir of the most character-driven sort. The plot is simple. There is no house of cards, just a damaged soul. The resolution comes not when the case is solved, but when Ryan finds redemption, no matter what else happens. This guy may not ever be happy, but ANY step forward is a good thing. Ray lays it on us with remarkable dexterity over a slim eighty-two minutes.
Everyone here is on their A-game. Bernard Herrmann’s score is big, pounding and full of oppressive drama right from his charging opening theme. Meanwhile, seminal noir cinematographer George E. Diskant (who also worked on Ray’s They Live By Night as well as the Ida Lupino-directed The Bigamist) does beautiful work in a job that runs him through his paces. There are the usual city night-world scenes, which this film often shoots from inside a moving car looking out at the streets (proto-Taxi Driver vibes from the view through a rain-splattered windshield). Then when the film switches to snow country, it’s actual location photography in Colorado with real frost, real trees and luscious winter light. All of that was rare for 1951, when Ray and Diskant could have easily shot all of this on a warm, cozy studio set with no complaints from anyone.
It’s a great movie that really stays with you.
Let’s also mention here that Warner Archive’s painstaking restoration for the Blu-ray is a knockout. You could count the raindrops.