In this sophisticated thriller the theme of the reluctant criminal in Ripstein's first film, Time to Die, evolves into a dopplegänger motif. Both men are "in for life," but where that film dealt with a duel that threatened to change a man's identity, here Pedro Armendáriz, Jr. portrays a man with dual identities, one stalking and threatening to overtake the other. An erstwhile delinquent with the alias "Tarzan" is now a prominent banker with a family and a mistress-that is, fully reintegrated into society. Under the thumb of the vicious police commander involved in his past arrests, he is blackmailed into re-entering a life of crime. In for Life is a powerful denunciation of the brutality and corruption of the Mexican police; Ripstein speaks of it as "a kind of film noir...Mexico is described as I see it."