Loophole

You know in five minutes how this film will end. But it is the journey, not reaching the destination that is the best part of this low-budget film noir piece. Barry Sullivan is miscast as a banker who has a bad day at the office. But Mcgraw is letter perfect in his Edward G imitation of "Double Indemnity". He plays the hard-nosed bond detective to a tee. The females do well in this film, also. I love the bank robber's moll, who was as evil as they get, and the good girl was predictably played well by good girl Dorothy Malone, who always suffered during love scenes (she could never convince the audience she was overtly sexy). She is fine in this role, however. Sullivan, who was famous for uttering one of the most famous lines that ever slipped through the censors in Hollywood with Barbara Stanwyck in "Forty Guns", when he tells Stanwyck that "she better not play with his gun or it might go off in her face". How the hell did that get through? Anyway, the direction is interesting and the production values are wretched, but somehow, the film works anyway. The idea is quite clever at the beginning. A watchable noir.