“I saw Crime Wave as a snake sliding through the night,” said director Andre de Toth about this nocturnal noir that he fought to film on city streets, far from studio sets. Shooting over fourteen nights, his crew slithered from the pitch-black streets of Bunker Hill to the old Glendale airport, and even gained clearance to film a robbery at a Bank of America and interrogations in an LAPD Homicide Bureau, all to “make viewers feel the bumps” of reality. Ex-con Gene Nelson now leads a straight life, but three San Quentin escapees have just started a crime wave, and they won't stop until he joins them. Sterling Hayden, as an overboiled cop, sneers from above, just waiting for Gene to make the wrong move. “They've always got a string on you, and they always tug,” mutters Gene, referring to cops and to thugs, but it's the throwaway line “I'm your pet rat, walking the gutters” that truly verbalizes Crime Wave's flair for the poetry of dirt, and the peculiar flavor of Southern Californian despair.