Details

Release year: 1953

Storyline

Lawyer defends migrant worker falsely accused of two murders.

Top credits

Directors

Don Siegel

Writers

Cast

Teresa Wright — Ellen Braden
Macdonald Carey — Doug Madison
Dolores Moran — Paula Mitchener
Adele Mara — Gracie Sager - Max Verne's Girlfriend

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Did you know

• After Director of Photography John Alton agreed to shoot this movie, he asked Producer Benedict Bogeaus how much he had budgeted for rigging - the system of overhead pipes, brackets, ropes, and cables that suspend lights over a film set. Bogeaus told him four thousand dollars. "Give me two thousand dollars above my salary and I won't use any rigging," said Alton. He did it by using almost no overhead lighting at all, contributing to the film's rich visual atmosphere.

• Though made on the cheap, and in only nine days, the film manages to dazzle with bravura set-pieces, most memorably the exciting pursuit of a suspect (Jack Elam) through darkened woods that recalls John Alton's film noir classics (He Walked by Night (1948) and Border Incident (1949)) while looking ahead to Don Siegel's later crime classics.

• The shadowy murder scene that opens the film anticipates Richard Brooks' film adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1967), the chronicle of a ghastly 1959 multiple murder in Holcomb, Kansas, that was six years in the future.