Rating: 16/20
Plot: A piano player on his way across country to visit his girlfriend in Los Angeles runs into some trouble after the man he hitches a ride with dies. The piano player assumes his identity and picks up a really mean passenger.
Such a fascinating little movie. On the one hand, it looks really cheap and the characters are generic. Edgar G. Ulmer directed the thing on a nothing budget in just six days. Tom Neal is awfully whiny as our protagonist and narrator and lacks punch, but he's an acceptable dupe. Ann Savage with her "homely natural beauty" is a vicious little bitch, squeezing pulpy insults out the sides of her mouth ("Kiss him with a wrench," "You'll pop into jail so fast it'll give you the bends") and bringing the feisty a little too hard. He's mopey and she's nasty, but together, they approach something close to noir magic with their hateful exchanges that dominate the second half of this movie.And Ulmer does a whole lot with his little. This storytelling's got lots of style with all these sneaky voyeuristic camera movements, hazy exteriors, a great use of shadows and light, and a terrific scene following a death with an in-and-out-of-focus glance around the room. With an interesting though less-than-plausible plot and a handful of damned characters, some who even realize they're damned, this is pretty far from perfect but still a good example of the genre made during its golden era. I would have preferred a less obvious ending, however. This should have ended with a shot of the protagonist walking on the shoulder of a highway, a lost doomed soul completely alone. It's too bad the lost doomed soul had to be arrested at the end because this movie was made in 1945.
Note: I'm surprised film noir classics I watched as a toddler didn't turn me into a smoker. I almost want to start smoking now so that I can talk with a cigarette in my mouth like characters like Al do. How did these movies not turn me into a smoker when I was a lot more impressionable?
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