In this "Citizen Kane in miniature,"* Zachary Scott portrays an inexorable climber who wields his way to the top on the Wall Street of the twenties. Sydney Greenstreet is the utilities magnate whose kingdom Scott invades. Blessed with a business sense of avarice and unencumbered by feelings of guilt, Scott is the American dream turned monster. Director Edgar G. Ulmer recalls, "It was a dangerous script that had to be cut because McCarthy came in. It was written by Alvah Bessie.... But they fought me every step because it was (an) indictment against one hundred percent Americanism, as Upton Sinclair saw it." Of the films maudits of the thirties and forties, perhaps none were as forsaken as those of Ulmer; only Detour (1946) has emerged from cult status to become a recognized classic of noir. Influenced by his early training as a set designer in Germany and Austria, Ulmer "represents the primacy of the visual over the narrative.... (He) worked on the lowest depths of Poverty Row...shooting his films in dingy studios on makeshift sets, on lightning swift schedules.... Ulmer transformed his camera into a precise instrument of feeling, and his convulsive abstractions of screen space intensify that feeling by investing it with particular gestures of light, shadow, form, and motion that define his own director's soul, and none other." *(Quotations by Myron Meisel and Ulmer in Kings of the Bs, McCarthy and Flynn, ed.)