Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
After the suspicious suicide of a fellow cop, tough homicide detective Dave Bannion takes the law into his own hands when he sets out to smash a vicious crime syndicate.
Fritz Lang's taut noir thriller is elevated above the genre norm chiefly by its performances, particularly Glenn Ford's quietly seething Bannion and Gloria Grahame's memorably tragic Debby Marsh. The plot is a solid but fairly conventional 'crusading cop vs. syndicate' structure that doesn't push many boundaries, and Lang's direction, while efficient and atmospheric, doesn't reach the expressionist heights of his earlier work. The film's novelty lies more in its unusually frank depiction of domestic violence and criminal brutality for the era than in any radical formal innovation. The ending resolves competently but without great surprise or resonance beyond genre expectations.