Lang paints what Peter Bogdanovich calls "a particularly venomous picture of American life" in his first film after his brush with McCarthyism-he was placed on a blacklist not as a communist, but as a potential communist. Made in twenty days with no chance for the careful preparation that was his wont, the film has a slim narrative pretext-switchboard operator Anne Baxter is seduced by womanizing Raymond Burr and, when he is found dead, suspected of murdering him. But Lang and his cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca (who also worked on Clash by Night), exploited the film's limited resources to create "an engaging murder caper with a forties flavor" (Maltin), a "convincingly stifling sense of shallow, paltry lives" (Wakeman), a "vicious realism" which "fights neorealism on its own ground" (Eric Rohmer, writing as Maurice Schérer in Cahiers du Cinema). Not bad for twenty days.