Humphrey Bogart chose Ray to direct his first foray into independent production (Santana Productions, housed at Columbia). For Bogey, this story of a child of the slums (John Derek) who becomes a petty criminal, causes the suicide of his young bride, and is accused of murdering a cop surely harked back to the thirties, the heyday of the socially conscious gangster film. As the defense attorney, Bogey passionately offers the kid's life story as Exhibit A. In Ray's hands, however, despite its flashback format, the film looks forward-to the fifties, when guilt and innocence may not be what they seem, and to be conscious at all is to be a rebel. If narcissistic pretty-boy hoodlum (“live fast, die young, and leave a good-lookin' corpse”) Nick Romano is punished for anything, it is for being inauthentic—as a rebel, as a lover. Burnett Guffey's gorgeous—and at the end, audacious—cinematography is shown to best effect in this restored print.
—Judy Bloch