“I don’t know you, I don’t see you, I’ve never had a good day with you from the beginning.” Gordon Wiles’s The Gangster is tough and bleak, but it’s also odd and dream-like; on one hand, it features one of the most perfectly gritty “corpse in the gutter” shots in all of noir, while, on the other hand, characters ponder and pause and float through scenes as we might see in an art film. Racketeer Shubunka (Barry Sullivan) is jaded and depressed because his control of Neptune Beach is slipping into the hands of his more ambitious rival Nelson (Sheldon Leonard), and he fears that his girlfriend, the soft-voiced, ghost-like, white-gowned Nancy Starr (Belita), will slip out of his hands too. Shubunka frequently visits a beachfront coffee shop where the employees see him as self-centered and unkind, always refusing their pleas for help; later, Shubunka’s pleas for help will go unanswered too. The thematic premise feels like that of Gorky’s novel The Lower Depths (David Fuchs’s source novel is called Low Company): desperate souls congregate in their collective shelter in a world of violence and injustice; they mope and suffer together, the ennui perfectly captured in a shot of the characters seated at different tables after closing time. Even with a limited budget, the director’s background in art direction has a starring role: rainy city street sets, B&W checkered ceilings and walls, thick-striped wallpaper reflected in mirrors, expressionist paintings in the gangster’s apartment, the words and faces of his associates circling his head as he walks the boardwalk in fear.