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Synopsis: Mastermind Dave Purvis plans an armored car hold-up. He recruits Benny McBride to his crew of criminals. Benny needs money. His burlesque queen wife is stepping out on him because he can't keep her in the kind of style she prefers and Benny thinks that one big score will settle things with her. Yvonne, Benny's wife, has other ideas. The main object of her affection, unbeknownst to her husband, is the man who is offering him the big score: Purvis. She wouldn't mind it if something untoward happened to him and Purvis assures her that he's "expendable." The robbery itself goes awry when a passing patrol car interrupts the heist. Purvis shoots and kills one of the cops as the gang makes their getaway. The dead cop's partner, Lt. Jim Cordell, takes it upon himself to bring in his partner's killer and throws himself into the case with a new rookie partner. Meanwhile, Purvis's gang begins to unravel as distrust and paranoia take their toll. Benny doesn't live to see the rest of the gang double cross eachother, and once on the run, their mistakes begin to catch up to them....

Waste Not, Want Not: Damn, that was quick. I'll say this about Richard Fleischer's crime flicks, they don't waste time on bullshit. This film sets up its players with a remarkable economy and lets them play things out in less than an hour and ten minutes. No padding. No fat. All lean. And even with the brisk pace of the film, it still has time for sub-plots, for grotesquerie, and for a little T & A on the sly. I've seen movies at twice this length that didn't have as much going on in them as this one. Even more amazing is the fact that it doesn't seem crowded. It seems like it's exactly the right length. Amazing.

Rogues Gallery: One of the best things about this particular exercise is the fact that it doesn't have a conventional lead actor. Everyone's a character actor. Steve Brody (Mapes) and Charles McGraw (Lt. Cordell ) seem to have been born playing these kinds of roles. William Tallman spent a big chunk of his career playing Perry Mason's straw man of a prosecutor, Hamilton Berger, which is a crying shame, because when he turned on the menace, he REALLY turned nasty (see also Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker). But the best of the bunch is Adelle Jurgens as Yvonne, the stripper with a heart of cold plated steel. She's a black widow in the finest film noir tradition. This film is packed with interesting faces.

Mean Streets: The tendency among early 50s crime thrillers to film on-location on the streets of Los Angeles as a cost saving measure pays dividends in most films with a half-way competent director behind the camera. Fleischer, a competent professional at the very minimum and a terrific entertainer at his best, squeezes every ounce of texture out of his locations, which gives the film a gritty underpinning to offset the speed of the narrative.

Having said all of that, the film makes it, in the end, with its utterly grotesque climax. The montage used when Purvis meets his inevitable demise is cinema at its most purely abstract: it's a magic show that conjures horrors out of light and shadows. But even at this level of abstraction, the audience knows exactly what's happening. It's a thing to see....