It is generally acknowledged that He Walked by Night, begun by Werker, was largely directed by Mann, uncredited. Certainly it has the creative stamp of the Mann-Alton collaboration. This film with an all-male cast begins with an intriguing observation: “The work of the police, like that of woman, is never done.” The prototype of the police procedural, what follows is a thrilling tour of Los Angeles in pursuit of a Nietzschean antihero (Richard Basehart) who has murdered one of the fold, a cop. But no one, not even a superman, has to walk alone in a Mann film-there's always a shadow (if not a doppelganger or two). This classic noir has lighting that ranges from police-baroque to abstract-geometric; a protracted, perfectly silent stakeout and a chase through L.A.'s vast storm drains; “scientific” forensics (introducing the “modus operandi file”), eat your heart out CSI; and a voiceover narration that could stop a crime with alliteration alone.