Found unconscious behind the wheel of his wrecked car, his strangled wife beside him, Steve Kenet (in a role tailor-made for Robert Taylor) quickly confesses to murdering his two-timing spouse. Then the seemingly simple case crumbles: Steve, a highly decorated WWII pilot, has had brain surgery for a combat injury, the result being periods of blackout. Is he hiding behind his hematoma? Or is he the genuine damaged goods? A short sojourn at the Hamelin County Psychiatric Hospital should reveal the secret of his psyche. There, Steve is put under the care of Dr. Ann (the warmly aloof Audrey Totter), who comes to believe in his innocence. Written by Sydney Boehm, who would soon script Fritz Lang's The Big Heat and Anthony Mann's Side Street, and Lester Cole, a member of “The Hollywood Ten” in the last days of his career, High Wall has all the symptoms of a neurotic noir, especially Taylor's vulnerable vet, dogged by his own desire for redemption, and the bevy of shrinks prognosticating personality disorders. Smothered by taunting shadows, the psychiatric hospital is a bedlam of the binned and broken, confining our unreliable recollector as he withstands several murderous flashbacks. “Psychiatry can never tell me what I must find out,” Dr. Ann tells her brooding pilot. That is the heart of the matter.