(1948)

Starring Richard Basehart, Roy Roberts, Whit Bissell; dir: Alfred Werker

Noir is ridiculously dark (by the standards of realism) but the stories are waking dreamscapes so it all fits. So when a nuts-and-bolts, ‘nothing but the facts, ma’am’, police procedural is so starkly chiaroscuro – bands of light fanning out from inky, onyx-dark streets, single-spot lighting dramatizing lone characters in impenetrable shadows and scenes without a greytone to be seen – it’s like finding a missing link.

1948’s Naked City ushered in the March of Time newsreel-style ‘documentary realism’ trend that was to powerfully influence the direction of crime films, but Naked City and its progeny didn’t look like this. He Walked By Night is more a bridge from film noir to 1950s pulp crime TV series. Their easy banality and glib presumptions of right and wrong, value judgements on status, occupation and gender are all present in the bookended prologue and epilogue here ("the Police’s work, like Woman’s, is never done", intones straight-faced the stentorian public-service style voiceover in the intro) but the central story in He Walked By Night fortunately is far more intriguing. It transcends the TV-style framing devices and justifies the Gothic dramatics of its extreme visuals.

These reinforce the otherworldly quality of the narrative, fortunately a ‘true story’ ("the names have been changed to protect the innocent", states the introduction), or we’d think we were being served up a comic-book tale of extraordinary criminal fiendishness, so extreme is this tale. In fact this dramatisation of actual burglar-turned-serial killer Erwin Walker, a WWII hero gone wrong who terrorised L.A. in 1946 (here portrayed by Basehart as Davis Morgan), plays more like an episode out of Batman than something from the police files. A mysterious scientific genius, evading capture and invisible to detection as he retreats nightly to his gadget-strewn hideaway – it’s the stuff of Marvel!

In comic-book fashion, Basehart’s Morgan is aligned more with raw animal sensibilities than human. Lured into an after hours trap at the electronics retailer, Basehart sniffs the air like a hound, sensing rather than seeing the cops laying in wait. That his only emotional connectivity is to his scraggy pet terrier both underlines this jungle level M.O. and explicitly links his emotionally shutdown character to the archetype of 'the killing machine with no emotions' created by Graham Greene’s This Gun For Hire and personified there by Alan Ladd – the similarly baby-faced assassin who stopped to place a bowl of milk before his household pet.

He Walked By Night is also a landmark in Hollywood’s discovery of forensic science, which obviously was experiencing explosive growth in the late 40s/early 50s. He Walked By Night introduces the Identikit Portrait with all the wonder of The Enforcer (which also had Roy Roberts in basically the same four-square detective role) discovering concepts like a ‘contract’ and ‘the hit’.  Roberts' Captain Breen walks his witnesses (and us, the audience) through the new identification process like little kids. Still, it works.

It was good enough for Jack Webb, seen here in a bit part as the morosely cynical forensic tech, whose Dragnet franchise of radio and TV series recycled much of He Walked By Night : "the names have been changed to protect the innocent"; the opening "this is the city, Los Angeles, California" monologue; the matter-of-fact progress via ‘going by the book’ - they even used the same police technical adviser. But one of Dragnet‘s many signature motifs which Webb had to look elsewhere for was its ominous theme music – this he revived from the original The Killers.

He Walked By Night is widely understood to be directed by longtime John Alton collaborator Anthony Mann, despite the credit going to Werker (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – 1939). The scene in Whit Bissell’s home where the killer, Basehart, half emerges in profile from the shadows is identical to the opening scene in the Mann/Alton T-Men with Charles McGraw, and Mann’s fingerprints are also all over the surprisingly rough treatment the cops give to witness Bissell, a wimp businessman obviously incapable of the ruthless crimes being investigated.

One year before Carol Reed and Orson Welles did so in The Third Man (1949), the bravura climax to He Walked By Night uses the city’s sewer system to stage the fugitive's final pursuit.  Alton’s lighting of this setpiece is nothing short of incredible, squares of light diminishing to vanishing point when seen from behind, mist-shrouded light sources identifying the approaching threat, etc etc. Conversely, the scene with the police car’s tire blocking Basehart’s final escape through the manhole cover it’s parked on had appeared the previous year - back across the pond - in Ealing's caper comedy Hue And Cry (1947)!

Regardless of who got where first it's brilliant, epochal stuff.  He Walked By Night is a very ‘B’ rough diamond, fitting neither its past nor its present, but all the more potent for that when seen today.