The story of Roy Martin (Richard Basehart) is based on the true crime of a war veteran with PTSD. While we don’t know what makes Roy be a bad guy, the semi-documentary style narration makes it clear he’s bad. However, there are some scenes without dialogue that makes us empathize with him, like his relationship with his sweet dog, and his pain as he removes a bullet.
Spoiler alert: Roy ends up dead, as he should in a film made during the Hays Code years, but he’s more approachable than most of the policemen, including Capt. Breen (a wink at censorship czar Joseph Breen). We almost want him to survive, to turn himself in so he doesn’t die. Or at least we want to understand him, or for him to find salvation somehow.
There are some very dark (and beautiful) scenes in this film, courtesy of cinematographer John Alton, and some of them directed by Anthony Mann (who took over the film directing towards the end of production, when Alfred L. Werker fell ill). But my absolute favorite scenes occur when the suspense is built upon the darkness with silence, or just sound effects, with no music whatsoever.
Finally, I love the dry ending, with no voice of God giving us a moral conclusion.
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.
Share this film
Story Elements
