The essential Ida Lupino is also the essential Walsh heroine-gutsy and tender, thriving on both qualities in the after-hours nightclub milieu of The Man I Love. Lupino's Petey is a singer who was trained in the proverbial school of hard knocks and has something to teach Christmas Holiday's Deanna Durbin. When Petey falls in love with a pianist (Bruce Bennett) it is with her eyes wide open: she sees what we see (Bennett's ungiving posture is a perfect physical metaphor, and a kind of foreshadowing). She bets no money on love but goes for it anyway and there is something particularly appealing about the way this both enhances and undercuts our investment in the melodrama. Walsh's marvelously atmospheric film is set among waterfront lounge lizards, underworld moguls and musicians steaming in late-night jam sessions; with its Gershwin songs (and mood), this was the inspiration for Martin Scorcese's New York, New York. The film is peopled with minor characters briefly but fully realized in all their quirks and vulnerabilities. And in its way it too is a family portrait-a purer and sadder one than in Christmas Holiday, to be sure-as Petey attempts to right the postwar world for a sister with a shellshocked husband and a brother in the grip of mobsters.