Baxter Martin on 13 May at 00:42

“He Walked By Night” (1948, Alfred L. Werker)

“He Walked By Night” was produced through the Eagle Lion company in 1948 and starred Richard Basehart and Jack Webb with Alfred L. Werker at the directorial helm. Who? What? Where? Today we think of B movies as an automatically lower class of films. I suppose ‘straight-to-video/dvd’ fare would fit a modern day B movie definition. B movies in the day were the double side of double features like B sides on records. Of course, it’s the A side everyone wants. Within the film noir canon, there are so many examples of B movies in the 1940s and 50s. And many of them are as impressive as their A movie brethren, “He Walked By Night” being one of them.

Film noir was/is a collection of motifs to define the spaces and the gaps in between. As always, there are many ways to tell a story and the conventions of the noir narrative would alter its course to suit the film. “He Walked By Night” employed a quasi-police-documentary approach. In fact, it’s almost a recruitment film for the LAPD of the time. The film showcases the latest in police technology, the superior organization of the LAPD, their breadth of knowledge of suspicious and convicted persons, and their overall 1948 big brother approach to keeping all citizens safe. It’s a bit over the top sometimes but so is a lot of the corny dialogue you’d hear out of the mouths of the A list noirs. This documentary approach brings a fair amount of narrating with it, to keep us up to the bewildering speed with which the police hunt down their man in a city ‘of 2 million’ with ‘700 miles of underground highway.’ Although it is hard to view the killer in films as a good guy, “He Walked By Night” is great at establishing who is good and who is bad in the narrative, but also creates characters we can be objective about seeing them inhabit the same world but by different sets of rules. The police and the criminals all look the same (tired, sarcastic, generally unhealthy and unhappy) but with different sets of clothes.
Objectivity is essential to the credulity of the documentary approach.

Richard Basehart plays the criminal mastermind Roy Martin. Basehart was an actor in over 30 films and countless tv. Jack Webb would go on a few years later to become one half of the iconic television duo on “Dragnet” as Sergeant Joe Friday. “He Walked By Night” was Alfred L. Werker’s 41st time in the director’s chair in a 30-year span. The film would be awarded the special prize for Best Police Film at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1949.

“He Walked By Night” is a must-see for those who really enjoy film noir from the classic period throughout the 1940s and into the 50s. For the casual viewer, better to stick to Bogart’s classics, “Murder My Sweet” and so on; the A movies.

on 11 February at 14:03

verry nice