It is 1950; the strained ambitions of the American dream lead to a lonely scurry through the naked city for a postman (Farley Granger, American Everyman) who steals to provide his pregnant wife with a few of life's finer things, and finds himself the unlucky middleman in a blackmail-murder scheme. Joseph Ruttenberg's New York cinematography traps Granger in a figurative grid of one-way streets down the canyons of Manhattan, but this is preferable to the frightening company of homicidal gangster James Craig and his masochistic moll Jean Hagen. One of several ominous film noirs directed by Mann (see Raw Deal, May 10 and T-Men, May 13), this epitomizes his nightmare world in which men are trapped by obsessions they barely recognize. In his famous essay "Underground Films," Manny Farber writes of "Anthony Mann's inhumanity to man.... The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body."