He Walked by Night

In Alfred L. Werker’s He Walked By Night, noir master John Alton’s cinematography turns Los Angeles into a sepulchral labyrinth (think flashlights in drainage tunnels), which serves as a beautiful setting for a manhunt and, possibly, an aesthetic influence on Carol Reed’s famous sewer sequence in The Third Man, released the following year. Inspired by a true story, the film begins with Roy Morgan’s (Richard Basehart) fatal shooting of a cop at point blank range, which leads to a city-wide search, including gathering witness observations (“His mouth was thin and mean, like it never laughed”). Rows of light and shadow from window blinds, like the bars of a prison cell, seem to entrap Morgan in almost every indoor setting, especially the bungalow where he lives with his little dog. The scene in which Roy removes a bullet from his own body with forceps must have caused excruciating audience discomfort in 1948 while creating some degree of sympathy for the killer.