Alan Ladd melodramas sometimes had a sameness about them but this one has the benefit to of two fresh angles – the hero is a postal inspector and the chief witness to a murder is a nun. The result is Ladd’s most solid movies.
There’s a laughable serious, Eisenhower Era-style introduction about the post office and some cute nun shenanigans (she goes to a pool hall, Ladd gives her a gun). But it’s taunt and pacy entertainment, with Ladd is in very good form – he seems to be having particular fun in his scenes with Calvert. He even takes off his shirt (in a good scene where he knocks out Jack Webb on a handball court), something he would soon grow too fat to do.
Structure-wise, the script probably waits too long to get going on the Ladd-goes-undercover story, around half an hour. Before then the film is set up as a Ladd-does-witness-protection-on-a-nun story, but then Calvert drops out of the picture for most of the middle section. It’s like they couldn’t realise what sort of film they were making – it’s a shame they couldn’t have incorporated the nun in the action a bit more (though Calvert’s performance is a bit annoying – it’s hard to play a nun well).
The chief baddie is Paul Stewart, who I couldn’t quite place until I googled him – he’s the butler, Raymond, in Citizen Kane. His henchman are Jack Webb and Henry Morgan, who later became cops together on Dragnet – so Dragnet fans will love (or be distressed by) the scene where Webb kills Morgan. (Morgan’s fate is sealed when he delivers a monologue about his kid – can’t be a henchman with weaknesses and survive. You can’t be a ruthless henchman and survive for that matter, but at least in that case you normally get to make it until the end of the film.)
Director Lewis Allen does a pretty decent job. It inspired me to look him up on the internet and he has a fair few films I enjoy on his resume, including The Uninvited and At Sword’s Point. Another unheralded helmer during Hollywood’s Golden Age.
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