He Walked by Night

Writen by CinemaSerf on July 08, 2022

This is actually quite a decent little murder mystery featuring the usually pretty uncharismatic Richard Basehart as a petty thief who kills a cop. The police chief allocates two detectives - Scott Brady and James Cardwell - with the seemingly impossible task of tracking down the criminal for a crime that nobody saw/heard etc... They start off by trawling the usual suspects and gradually begin to piece it together and to see the light. It's tensely directed with lots of help from Leonid Raab's score; some suitably eerie lighting and Crane Wilbur's adaptation of his own story is a bit more complex giving the investigator's characters a little more substance than usual. Although the ending does rather let it down somewhat, it still makes for quite an entertaining 80 minutes.