He Walked by Night (1948)

US MGM DVD edition


A very well made Manhunt Film Noir crime movie with a fantastic performance from Richard Baseheart as the desperado (he's
also very good in Anthony Mann's 1949 The Black Book as the revolutionary killer Robespierre - read more about this film on
my Film Noir & Pulp Fiction page). This is stringently made and in almost documentary style after a real crime case at the LA Police.
Suspenseful about an intelligent and elusive robber and police killer. With Police procedure that came to inspire the ground-
breaking TV series Dragnet.

A cop on his way home after work accidently passes a radio store where a young man is trying to B&E and the policeman gets
killed brutally. The LA police puts on a massive Dragnet after the well dressed and proper nice-looking young man, but without
any results due to him being unknown to the criminal world of Los Angeles.

The man starts robbing a series of stores and uses the LA sewer systems for his escape, and this exciting film ends with a Manhunt
in the Sewerage, something that may have inspired Carol Reed and Graham Greene when making their masterpiece The Third Man
some year after this film was amde. Who can forget the hunt for Orson Welles in the Vienna sewer tunnels ?
Presented in 4:3 fullscreen original ratio, black & white, english audio

 

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