Despite a gutless ending enforced by the studio, Douglas Sirk's stylish and always intelligent direction saved the day for this B-film noir about a parole officer on the take (Cornel Wilde) who 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 an unexpectedly fine performance by Patricia 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), recalls Fuller, “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 was pursuing them. That's the main theme of my story.” (Quotations from Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk and Peter Wollen, ed., Samuel Fuller.)