The American dream takes a beating in both of tonight's film noirs, but Pitfall is the more pitiless of the two in delineating the malaise at the core of middle-class suburban life with great "hard-boiled" dialogue and without recourse to Hitchcock's distancing ironies. Dick Powell is the cherub with a dirty face at the center of this cautionary tale about a bored husband whose night errant with luscious Lizabeth Scott leads him to commit murder. In a not very happy ending, his wife (Jane Wyatt) exonerates and promises to stay with him, although their relationship can never be quite "the same." His life sentence is sealed.