In this film noir, Farley Granger plays one of the dumbest regular guys to ever get mixed up in big city crime. He’s got a wife, a baby on the way, a part-time job as a mailman, about one-fourth of a brain in his head, and $30,000 that he stole from a crooked lawyer. Due to making nothing but the worst possible decisions throughout the entire film, Granger ends up the prime suspect in a murder that he didn’t commit and chased for the money he stole.
Following up on Nicholas Ray’s great They Live By Night, this is the second film to pair Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell. Granger even plays a similar character here: a basically good guy who’s got no business living a life of crime. However, this isn’t nearly as good and it even wastes Cathy O’Donnell, who glows in They Live By Night, but barely flickers here as the laid-up wife. Distinguished genre director Anthony Mann has better films to his name.
The New York City scenery is very nice, though. This was shot on location, with several stunning bird’s-eye-views of urban sprawl.