Highly entertaining police procedural/wrong man flick. The film is loaded with black humor and colorful characters... especially Elsa Lanchester, who absolutely steals the show. I tend to put procedurals in a separate category or offshoot of noir, but I still enjoy them. This movie always manages to keep things interesting. And fantastic noirish visuals. I was pretty engaged throughout the length of the film. It does have a bizarre, fragmented narrative, but it totally worked for me.

A low-budget police procedural with occasional splashes of noir expertly rendered by cinematographer Alton. Montalban is likable, and it is fun watching them use all the 60 year-old "cutting edge" forensic technology.

Reminds me of Dassin's Naked City, and is similarly flat in tone, barely qualifying as a true "film noir." It's a by-the-book police procedural above all, and the movie only begins to pick up steam again in the final 15 or 20 minutes, when the actual murder plot comes back into play. It's not a bad movie, it's just a very vanilla one, and I wouldn't classify it as a film noir.

The movie gets off to a pretty great start, boasting Alton's stark photography to lend a sinister tone to a great murder scene. Then the detective work starts when the sun comes up the next day, and it stays there. The movie loses a lot of steam for the entire middle section. It's very casual and boring, Alton's cinematography ceases all chiaroscuro, and Montalban has virtually zero screen presence. It ends on a pretty high note though, when it dips back into a darker tone.