Douglas Sirk's stylish and always intelligent direction saved the day for this B film noir despite a gutless ending enforced by the studio. Cornel Wilde, a parole officer on the take, is lured into marriage with a paroled murderess (Patricia Knight) and then flees with her when she shoots her ex in a brawl. Sirk has noted the unexpectedly fine performance by Knight, who "kind of understood what I was after--the sparse freedom of human existence." But neither Sirk nor scriptwriter Samuel Fuller were well served by Columbia's front-office rewrite (Fuller attempted to remove his name) and both have given rueful, enticing accounts of the film that got away. In the original conception (titled The Lovers), Fuller recalls, "the lovers run away but they don't realize that for the greater part of the film, no one is in fact chasing them. They're overcome with panic, fear and hate, out of which comes extreme violence, although no one is pursuing them." (Quotations by Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, and Peter Wollen, ed., Samuel Fuller.)