When you get right down to it, there’s nothing more noir than a prison escape story. They’re all doomed and so is this one in which Dennis O’Keefe slips out of the big house with help from a devoted Claire Trevor and stick-in-the-mud social worker Marsha Hunt, who appeals to him to turn himself in. Meanwhile, the law breathes down their neck like a hound after fresh meat. Director Anthony Mann pumped out some tight noir flicks in his day and this is one of those. See ’em all. With help from definitive genre cinematographer John Alton, Mann’s compositions here are often half-shadow (at least), boiling with tension to its very edges. There’s no room, not even an inch, for happiness here. Even Claire Trevor’s deadpan narration sounds like its coming from someone who’s just seen a bomb drop.