He Walked by Night **** (1948, Richard Basehart, Scott Brady, Roy Roberts, James Cardwell, Whit Bissell, Dorothy Adams, Jack Webb) – Classic Movie Review 2393

‘Savage! searing! true! From the homicide files of the Los Angeles police.’ Scott Brady and James Cardwell play the Los Angeles police detectives, Sergeants Marty Brennan and Chuck Jones, assigned to lead the manhunt for a psychotic robber, Davis Morgan (Richard Basehart), who shoots dead Officer Rawlins, a patrolman on his way home from work, asking him for his ID, suspecting him of being a burglar.

Director Alfred L Werker’s realistic-feeling 1948 black-and-white police procedural thriller may be cheaply made but it is an extremely effective, engrossing documentary-style film noir. There’s an especially fine climax in LA’s storm drainage tunnel system where the killer tries to make his getaway, a sequence remarkably similar to the ending of The Third Man (1949) in which Orson Welles’ character of Harry Lime is chased through the sewers of Vienna.

It is propelled along with (1) excellent performances from a stalwart B-movie cast, particularly by main star Basehart, but also by Brady, Cardwell and Roy Roberts as Captain Breen; (2) the careful details and convincing dialogue in the screenplay by John C Higgins, Crane Wilbur and Harry Essex; (3) a strong score by Leonid Raab; and (4) a continuously tense, taut, believable atmosphere painstakingly achieved by director Werker. Perhaps best of all, though, is that the movie boasts a dazzling noir surface sheen thanks to John Alton’s eye-catching cinematography.

The script is loosely based on newspaper accounts of the real-life actions of Erwin ‘Machine-Gun’ Walker, a former Glendale California police department employee and World War Two veteran who unleashed a crime spree of burglaries, robberies and shootouts around Los Angeles in 1945-46.

One of the actors, Jack Webb (who plays Lee Whitey), became friends with the police technical advisor, Detective Sergeant Marty Wynn, and was inspired to create the radio and later TV show Dragnet.

Whit Bissell is another notable cast member as electronics dealer Paul Reeves. Also in the cast are Dorothy Adams, Robert Bice, Frank Cady, John Dehner, Ann Doran, Rex Downing, Michael Dugan, Reed Hadley, Harry Harvey, Felice Ingersoll, Stan Johnson, Tommy Kelly, Donald Kerr, Charles Lang, Billy Mauch, Carlotta Monti, John Parrish, Paul Scardon, Kenneth Tobey, Harlan Warde, Robert Williams and Harry Wilson.

With copyrights not renewed, the film is now in public domain.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2393

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