In a city that seems too small and empty, we follow a newspaper's hunt for a murderer. The few places we see (an apartment that recurs too often, a bar that the characters predictably frequent) lead finally to where we cannot see, a confrontation between murderer and protagonist (Dana Andrews) in a subway tunnel. It is a scene emblematic of the claustrophobia of a lethargic, selfish, dying world, and connoting Andrews's wrestling with a disturbed psyche. In noir/Lang style, he is linked in a strange and fatalistic way to an underworld which, on the surface, presents itself as his opposite. He pursues the killer with growing intensity, though he has no stake in the capture; he knows the killer's mind and method; he risks the life of his fiancee in rejoining the homicide investigation; and in one scene he is cross-cut with the killer, as though they were at opposite ends of the same ego. Ida Lupino plays a curious femme-fatale-mother-figure to Andrews-one which he revolts against, despite the honesty and wit of Lupino. The tension within Andrews plays unnervingly with that of the murderer, who, in anticipation of Psycho, kills women out of revenge against an over-possessive mother. -Ryan DeRosa