"Thirty years ago, when I first saw the Hecht-MacArthur Crime Without Passion, I thought it ten or fifteen years ahead of its time. I was optimistic. Seeing it recently again I feel we still haven't caught up with it." (Herman G. Weinberg, Saint Cinema, 1970). If Crime Without Passion seems unique today, it is because of its synthesis of a variety of wildly dissimilar styles: the expressionism of Claude Rains' acting and Slavko Vorkapitch's montages, the sophistication of Hecht and MacArthur, and the lush, low-contrast photography of Lee Garmes. Rains stars as a Nietzchean defense lawyer whose analytic mind, which serves him so well in the courtroom, brings him disaster in private life. He ends up a haunted murderer driven by circumstances rather than the cynical manipulator of society he would like to be. The high points of the film are a delirious opening montage sequence featuring the three furies hurtling through Manhattan to cackle at accomplished seductions; and a coup-de-theatre climax in which the murderer confronts his supposed victim while a huge grinning cartoon head winks in the background.