Hour-long B-noir earns its cult rep from one of Nathanael West’s last scripts (dead this year at 37), thru some off-the-beam direction by gadabout writer/producer Boris Ingster (first of only three directing gigs*), but mostly in the no-holds-barred cinematography of RKO film noir specialist Nicholas Musuraca, largely shooting on the studio backlot NYC tenement block. Then there’s the half-reel dream sequence for leading man John McGuire (pretty good) as he re-imagines the murder trial where his testimony could send young cabby Elisha Cook Jr to ‘the chair,’ now repeating as a nightmare with all that circumstantial evidence pointing at him. (Both cases absurdly weak, a black mark on West.) The girl in the pic, McGuire’s worrying fiancé Margaret Tallichet (pretty bad), mopes around to bring the running-time up to feature length and be a possible victim, but keep your expectations under control and there’s lots of Hollywood-style German Expressionist art direction to gaze at via fancy dissolves, canted angles, pore revealing close-ups and psychologically penetrating double or triple exposures. Presumably done with an optical printer, yet showing no grain deterioration. In silent days, these effects got done right in the camera by rewinding the negative for another exposure, leaving grain unchanged. But that technique little used for over a decade, since the Talkies came in. So how’d Musuraca do it? (Assuming it was him and not the special effects unit.) Elsewise, top-billed Peter Lorre shows up here and there to look suspicious & vaguely disturbed; threaten the girl and (no surprise) eventually confess to the killings. (Lorre filling in with one-shot jobs in the interegnum between his wonderful MR. MOTOs at 20th/FOX and upcoming classics under contract at Warners.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Right at the end of his career, Ingster hit the jackpot, producing a slew of MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. episodes.
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