By Robert Bellissimo
“People who go to movies in order to flee distress are advised to steer clear of Endfield’s corrosive work.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Critic
The police have Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) surrounded as his wife, Kathleen Ryan (Judy Tyler) and a crowd look on. His wife screams out, “Honey, what did you do”? This one line gets to the heart of the film. This film is full of anxiety, despair, fear and regrets. It’s a film noir that is completely underrated. It has incredible performances from Lloyd Bridges, who plays a psychotic criminal and Frank Lovejoy, who plays a blue collar worker who gets pulled into a life of crime out of desperation.
The first hour of the film centers around Bridges and Lovejoy’s characters before focusing on Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson), a journalist who writes an article about a murder that Howard Tyler and Jerry Slocum have been charged with. He calls them monsters and indicts them in the press before they’ve been tried. He is warned by Dr. Vido Simone (Renzo Cesana) that he is appealing to his readers’ emotions before the men have been tried and is dehumanizing them, which he finds dangerous. The Doctor is ultimately proven right as the article dredges up fear and hate. A mob forms in order to kill Tyler and Slocum. The power of the press and the dangers of what they can do, when they spark fear, is more relevant today than it ever has been. The film holds up better now than it did 75 years ago when it was released.
The film clearly is on the side of empathy and reason. It’s saying that people turn to violence because of their environment. It should be treated like a disease and we should never forget that even criminals are human beings. The empathy given towards the criminals in the film is dealt with compassionately and how the film warns about the power of the press is done simply and directly.
This is a film noir that has most of the film noir tropes that we all love. A doomed protagonist, damaged war veterans, claustrophobia, crime, desperation, anxiety, among other things, but it goes further and is a noir that should be on many top 10 film noir lists.
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