Cold, calculating, and over-the-top with both its romantic entanglements and formulations of violence, it's a strangely masochistic film absent of any kind of audience investment, with a femme fatale who strangely lives up to her choice surname.

...one of the most inexplicable, poorly conceived, and even more poorly executed genre exercises of its time.

It's this British movie's status as an ersatz 'American' gangster picture that makes it particularly distinctive; there's a not-quite-rightness about the production that gives it a dream-like, Bronte-via-'Black Mask' atmosphere.

Notorious in its day, this 1948 British adaptation of James Hadley Chase's novel is a noir-tinged crime drama with lurid edges and an American setting that never quite comes off...