A nightmarish thriller from one of the masters of the film noir genre, Jacques Tourneur, whose specialty, as in Out of the Past, is a kind of Mobius-strip narrative in which the present folds gracefully into a flashback past to set a menacing mood for the future. Bleak determinism is woven into the fabric of this story of an innocent man caught up in a series of dangerous incidents which are complicated by his own paranoia. Aldo Ray stars as the artist Jim Vanning, falsely implicated in the murder of his friend, and pursued by the actual killers, whose loot he has found. For him, nightfall and the city streets hold the protection of anonymity, while the snow-covered landscapes of Wyoming, where a memorable climax takes place, hold only terror. Stirling Silliphant's screenplay is based on a novel by David Goodis who wrote the novel Shoot the Piano Player.