Just like in the earlier
Phantom Lady (1944), Ella Raines once again plays a female amateur sleuth trying to save the man she loves from the electric chair in Arthur Lubin’s
Impact. (It’s a role she does well.) This time, she plays Marsha Peters, owner of a car mechanic shop who takes a liking to drifter Walter Williams (Brian Donlevy), offers him a job, and takes him home to meet her mother. What Marsha doesn’t know is that Walter is a “murder victim.” Days earlier, his wife Irene (Helen Walker) had plotted for her lover to beat Walter to death when stopped to repair a flat tire; the plan went awry and it’s the lover’s unrecognizable corpse that the police (and Irene) have mistaken for Walter. The complicated plot has a few logic gaps, but the film is fast-paced, the San Francisco settings are beautiful, and Walker’s performance as a duplicitous bitch is delicious (even her pet name for Walter — “Softy” — undermines his manhood). Lubin brilliantly stretches the suspense from the flat tire sequence: the isolated cliff, the lug wrench close-up, the train signal, the motorist who stops to help, and a spectacular fuel-truck explosion.
