Director: Elia Kazan
Cast: Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Jack Palance, Zero Mostel
Have I Seen it Before: Never. I’m the kind of guy that remembers Palance from Batman (1989) more than anything else.
Did I Like It: If the art of making a thriller is, at its fundamental level, an act of telling a basic story while adding—as seemlessly as possible—complications to the proceedings, this one succeeds in spades.
If anything, it plays even better in the 2020s. A noir murderer cat and mouse game playing at the razors edge of the breakout of a potential endemic of pneumonic plague* works so well, this viewer almost feels like he’s taking advantage of the filmmakers** and got two full A-length features for the price of one.
A less skillful attempts at such material would ave felt uneven and over-complicated, but before we give Kazan too much credit (he deserves as much as we can give him, garnished for everything else he did), there’s something about this cast that is taking advantage of iconic talent before they became iconic. I’d recommend this as a crime movie that partners up Mostel and Palance, and that should be more than enough. Mostel wheezes and Palance glares through the film, perfectly and perpetually trading off their positions as the most interesting thing in the movie. That might hint that Widmark’s leading turn is a little underpowered, and that’s at least somewhat true, but such a minor complaint in such an otherwise electrifying movie.
*Where sufferers can’t remember things for a test, no matter how many memory tricks they use. Har har har.
*Not really. Please insert your own comment about how Kazan is simultaneously both a rat and an imminently solid director. He was and he was. What more could I add to the discourse on that subject? Go look up Orson Welles’ thoughts on the matter. He says it much better than I ever could.