From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- American Psycho Number27-Jack Webb’s “He Walked By Night”

DVD Review

He Walked By Night, starring Richard Basehart, Jack Webb, Warner Brothers, 1948    

Who knows what makes a guy flip, a guy turn into a flat-out maniac, a stone-cold killer when to all the whole wicked world he looks like a guy who is just a little eccentric, a little bit of a loner, and not a guy who has an immense unfulfilled (unquenchable) grudge against the world. Then a little midnight caper, a little heist,  turns sour, a cop gets a little suspicious since there have been a ton of burglaries and robberies in the neighborhood and the guy goes crazy, and the cop winds up dead, very dead.  

Of course when a cop gets killed other cops are ready to work night and day 24/7/365 to bring the culprit to justice and it that process of bringing that stone-cold psycho killer to justice that drives this little film noir police procedural, He Walked By Night. They don’t start with much to work with since our psycho was very smart, had a sophisticated scheme, and was very knowledgeable about what the cops were up to as they closed in on him. And that in the end was his undoing as some very ordinary back-filling police work leads to his identification.     

Funny as classically well done as this film is as a police procedural (getting the bad guys after all is what crime film noir is all about) it was not at all clear why our culprit turned on society and that failing takes away from each of the actions to try to corral him. So we will definitely have to put this in the B-film files although the scenes at the end when the cops corral our mad monk psycho are very evocative of other famous chase scenes (think The Third Man).