This is not a love story, much as the fated vixen Janis Carter and the sucker who falls for her, Glenn Ford, desperately would have us believe it is. As things develop between these two, he is a pawn in her scheme to murder her lover's wife and make off with a wealthy husband--until she falls for him, and the worm turns. The style is flat, the milieu middle class, the effect gritty. And in the noirs, no femme can be this fatale and get away with it. Robert Porfiro notes in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference, "Janis Carter, had she not remained in low budget films, might have rivaled Barbara Stanwyck as the leading noir actress of the 1940s. Carter was adept at adding sexual overtones to sadistic acts.... In a singular example of the perfidious nature of the fatal woman, she poisons Mike's coffee when he seems adverse to her plans, only to withdraw the coffee at the last moment when his conversation takes on a more reassuring tone."