Impressively gritty, detailed, but to-the-point Andre de Toth thriller utilises a magnificently seamy Sterling Hayden, as Detective-Lieutenant Sims, a man of few scruples about pressuring and oppressing his informants, especially when a trio of stick-up artists (Ted DeCorsia, Charles Bronson still in his Buchinsky phase, and Nedrick Young) kill a policeman after knocking over a service station, setting him to work like a shaggy, hungry puma.
Young is wounded in that confrontation, and makes his way to the apartment of his former cellmate Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson), where he expires on his lounge chair. Steve, having gotten married to Ellen (Phyllis Kirk) and gone straight, now working as an airplane mechanic, contends with a doctor-turned-veterinarian, Hessler (Jay Novello), whom on-the-lam crims rely on to patch up their wounds, and then with DeCorsia and Bronson, when they come around seeking their dead friend, soon realising as they do that Steve is the perfect replacement for Young in their upcoming big job, and can force him to do anything they want with Ellen in their hands. Steve is, soon, caught in a vice between apparently, equally careless representatives of the law and the underworld.
Hayden is memorably boorish and weary in his seen-it-all cynicism, dragged out of bed to inspect a murder scene, unshaven and wearing his tie back-to-front, and then grilling an array of frightened, anguished stoolies: there are eight million losers in his naked city. He takes a bare-faced pleasure in rattling his quarries that borders on the sadistic, but he finally proves not such a bad old soul. The stripped-down portrait of policing as a potentially morally ambivalent business, which can be as cruel as any of the criminality it purports to put down, is matched by crisply shot, almost constant location shooting, with plentiful procedural detail, revelling in a mix of fastidious realism and nocturnal fatalism that flows through many of the best ‘50s noir films (eg Armored Car Robbery, The Asphalt Jungle, The City Never Sleeps).
A thoroughly convincing cast (House of Wax fans like myself will of course spot all the recurring De Toth actors), except for the slightly too square Nelson, is peppered with professional creeps, especially the frayed, ineffably sleazy Novello, and a fabulous appearance by the immortal Timothy Carey as a hophead sex fiend in whose dubious hands DeCorsia leaves Kirk for the duration. It’s a great pity then that it resolves in a curtailed conclusion which badly disappoints the mounting tension and offers an easy escape hatch where the narrative has carefully closed off the alternatives.
