The Crooked Way

Eddie Rice wakes up after the war to find himself in hell. Robert Florey’s amnesia noir, The Crooked Way, is brutal and dark, both physically and morally, a tale of lost identity exaggerated beautifully by John Alton’s expressionistic cinematography. When a war injury renders Eddie (John Payne) unaware of his own identity and history, he finds himself pursued by gangsters and approached by Nina Martin (Ellen Drew), Eddie’s ex-wife (of which he’s unaware) whose complicated feelings toward Eddie and recent employment by crime boss Vince Alexander (Sonny Tufts) place her in overlapping sets of crosshairs. The plot races along, punctuated by fits of brutality: multiple shootings of men and women, Eddie’s body dropped down a fire escape, cops raining machine gun bullets on a warehouse in which men are brawling, etc. Most scenes take place at night, which minimizes budget requirements and maximizes Alton’s inventiveness, which is revved up in a majority of scenes, like the staircase march of the thugs up to Eddie’s apartment and Nina’s nighttime meeting in the bail bond office with silhouetted window lettering sprayed across the walls.