Goodness gets very little breathing room in André De Toth’s Crime Wave, an arresting noir from 1954 about an ex-con who gets the squeeze by three escaped cons being hunted by Sterling Hayden. The film’s docu-realist aesthetic has a French New Wave lucidity and an undulating sense of montage, suggesting characters caught in the riptide of a moral terror beyond their control. The story isn’t groundbreaking, but the emotional feeling it affects is gripping and haunting. Budd Boetticher’s The Killer Is Loose, from 1956, is a bit loose-limbed at first but grows into a remarkably sick tittie-twister. Wendell Corey, as the bespectacled bank robber who vows to kill the wife of the police officer (Joseph Cotton) who killed his own wife, is a creepy maniac on a mission that spares no one. The final scene, in which Corey is dressed as a woman and stalks Rhonda Fleming back to her house is a tense show of doubt and shifting perspectives—a remarkable finale that obviously had an influence on Brian De Palma (imagine it in color and give it a split-screen and you might be watching Dressed to Kill or Raising Cain).
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